News

Mark Zuckerberg Set To Launch New App To Rival Twitter

Published

2 years ago

July 4, 2023

Editor

Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.

Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app”, available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is “expected” this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “sanely” irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a “verified” account.

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.

He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped “extreme levels” of data to train their models.

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling.

In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too.

And he added that Musk’s decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become “technically unusable”.

– ‘Remarkably bad’ –

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions.

Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into “hand-to-hand combat” to win back advertisers.

“How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage,” tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.

Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s chaos had been “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers.

“Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both,” he told AFP.

He said Twitter had “moved from stable to startup” and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter’s rivals to suck up any cash from advertisers.

– ‘Open secret’ –

The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of users immediately brought a backlash.

Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which “is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context”.

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter’s head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in “doesn’t pass the sniff test”.

“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,” he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.

“We knew about it. It was fine.”

News

NiMet Predicts Three-day Rain, Thunderstorms From Monday

Published

14 hours ago

September 21, 2025

Editor

News

JUST IN: Ooni Visits Olubadan-designate Ladoja In Ibadan

Published

19 hours ago

September 21, 2025

Editor

The Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Ogunwusi, on Sunday, paid a visit to the Olubadan designate, Rashidi Ladoja, at his Bodija private residence in Ibadan, Oyo State.

The PUNCH reports that Oba Ladoja will be installed as the 44th Olubadan on Friday, September 26, 2025, following the demise of the 43rd Olubadan, Oba Owolabi Olakulehin, who joined his ancestors on Monday, July 7, 2025, at the age of 90 years.

The two paramount rulers are currently exchanging pleasantries.

Details later…

News

JUST IN: FG Revokes 1,263 Mineral Licenses Over Unpaid Fees

Published

19 hours ago

September 21, 2025

Editor

The Federal Government through the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development has announced a fresh revocation of not less than 1,263 mineral licenses.

These licenses, which will now be deleted from the Electronic Mining Cadastral System portal of the Nigerian Mining Cadastral Office, include 584 exploration licenses, 65 mining leases, 144 quarry licenses, and 470 small-scale mining leases.

The minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, gave the revocation announcement in a statement issued by his special assistant on Media, Segun Tomori, on Sunday in Abuja.

The minister explained that the directive was issued due to the companies’ failure to comply with the requirement of paying their annual service fees.

The latest revocation brings the total mineral titles revoked under the current administration to 3, 794 including,619 mineral titles revoked for defaulting in paying annual service fees and 912 for dormancy last year.

By opening up the areas formerly covered by these licenses, the revocation is expected to spur fresh applications by investors looking for fresh opportunities.

The statement read, “Not less than 1,263 mineral licenses will be deleted from the portal of the Electronic Mining Cadastral system of the Nigerian Mining Cadastral Office, MCO, following their revocation by the Federal Government.

“These include 584 exploration licenses, 65 mining leases, 144 quarry licenses, and 470 small-scale mining leases.”

Approving the revocation following the recommendation of the MCO, the Minister said applying the law to keep speculators and unserious investors away from the mining sector would make way for diligent investors and grow the sector.

“The era of obtaining licences and keeping them in drawers for the highest bidder, while financially capable and industrious businessmen are complaining of access to good sites, is over.

“The annual service fee is the minimum evidence that you are interested in mining. You don’t have to wait for us to revoke the license because the law allows you to return the license if you change your mind,” the minister said.

He warned that the revocation does not mean the Federal Government has pardoned the annual service debt owed by licensees, adding that the list will be forwarded to the Economic & Financial Crimes Commission to ensure that debtors pay or face the wrath of the law.

“This is to encourage due diligence and emphasise the consequences of inundating the license application processes with speculative activities.”

In the recommendation to the minister, the Director-General of the MCO, Simon Nkom, disclosed that there were 1,957 initial defaulters when the MCO published the intention to revoke licences in the Federal Government Gazette on June 19, 2025.

He informed the minister that the gazette was distributed to MCO offices nationwide to sensitise licencees and encourage them to comply within 30 days in compliance with the Minerals and Mining Act 2007 and relevant regulations.

He observed that the delay in the final recommendation was due to complaints of several licensees who claimed to have paid to the Federal Government through Remita and had to be reconciled.

Earlier this month, the DG MCO had hinted that more mining licences would be revoked as part of ongoing efforts to sanitise the solid minerals sector and protect investors from fraudsters.

According to Nkom, the clean-up exercise, which covers expired, speculative, and inactive titles, is necessary to make room for genuine investors and ensure compliance with the law.

This is part of ongoing efforts at sanitising the sector since the inception of the Tinubu administration, and the salutary effects of the reforms are massive and manifest despite the attempts to push back by defaulters and their agents.