Big Tech Shakeup: Twitter Limits Post Views, Puts TweetDeck Behind Paywall, While Meta Launches Its ‘Threads’ Copycat App – Meanwhile, Chinese TikTok Surges With Videos of France’s Unrest

Change is the very nature of social media. But what we’ve been seeing in the last few days is a sweeping reorganization of the business landscape, as big companies readjust their strategies to the new Geopolitical realities.

To begin with, Twitter is under attack. The most celebrated social media platform is paying the political price for Elon Musk’s decision to stand up for free speech and against the ‘censorship industrial complex’ that was operating inside the platform.

So the attacks are coming hard and fast, be it ‘extreme’ data scraping and system manipulation, be it initiatives by other Big Tech CEOs, like Mark Zuckerberg, to create competitor apps to fight for Twitter’s user base.

Reuters reported:

“Twitter made the announcement in a tweet detailing an improved version of TweetDeck with new features. It was unclear if Twitter will charge users for both the new and old version of TweetDeck. Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Charging for TweetDeck, which was previously free and is widely used by businesses and news organizations to easily monitor content, could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertising revenue under billionaire Elon Musk’s ownership.

The move comes just days after Musk said that both verified and unverified users would have a limited number of posts they could read per day ‘to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation’.”

The new measures have created a measure of pushback from Twitter users, and ad experts warn this may hurt new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s job to expand ad revenue.

In Twitter Blue, individuals pay $8 per month to verify their account, while organizations pay $1,000 monthly.

Post by Twitter support:

“We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://tweetdeck.twitter.com by selecting ‘Try the new TweetDeck’ in the bottom left menu. Some notes on getting started and the future of the product below: – All your saved searches, lists, and columns will carry over to the new TweetDeck. You’ll be prompted to import your columns when you load the application for the first time. – TweetDeck now supports full composer functionality, Spaces, video docking, polls, and more. – Teams functionality in TweetDeck is temporarily unavailable and will be restored in the coming weeks. – In 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s main archenemy, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, is about to launch its Twitter competitor, ‘Threads’, a real threat to the blue bird dominance in its niche.

BBC Reports:

“Facebook owner Meta is launching its new app to rival Twitter and says it will go live on Thursday. The app, which is called Threads and is available for pre-order on the Apple App Store, will be linked to Instagram.

Screengrabs show a dashboard that looks similar to Twitter. Meta describes Threads as a ‘text based conversation app’.”

The move by Instagram/Meta is another escalation in the bitter rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk. So elevated are the tensions between the two that, last month, they seemed to agree to a physical fight.

Read more about it here:

The Musk-Zuckerberg Cage Fight: Elon Will Work with Legendary Trainer Georges St-Pierre – Mark is an experienced Jujitsu Competitor – UFC’s Dana White Says Trial by Combat of the CEOs Will Be Most Watched Fight In History

“‘Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow’ the description on the App Store says.

[…] It being a Meta app, Threads will also hoover up data on your phone, including location data, purchases and browsing history.”

While many companies have tried to launch their Twitter equivalents, Meta’s ‘Threads’ is likely to become the biggest threat faced by Twitter to date.

Musk has been praised in the sane corners of the web for his commitment to free speech, but he has also alienated some users, and deeply angered the deep state. Zuckerberg hopes to pull enough disenchanted users away from Twitter to create a genuine alternative.

“Meta has the resources to compete with Twitter. Threads will be part of the Instagram platform, so it will also be connected to hundreds of millions of accounts. It’s not starting from zero, as other would-be rivals have had to do.”

Meanwhile, Chinese app TikTok is thriving at the moment, experiencing soaring usage levels due to the coverage of French riots in the platform.

Footage of the riots in France have become hugely popular last week, and even President Emmanuel Macron resorted to blaming TikTok, Snapchat and other apps ‘for fueling violence’.

Bloomberg reports:

“The live coverage of the riots on TikTok was especially viral, says Guillaume Lacroix, the Chief Executive Officer of Brut, a youth-focused media company that distributes its content primarily via social networks. Brut gained 700,000 TikTok subscribers, bringing its total to 5.3 million, and quadrupled its weekly number of views, Lacroix said. 

[…] As many cities across France saw riots and looting after the killing of a 17-year-old by a police officer last Tuesday, thousands of TikTok users livestreamed scenes on the app. Some of the scenes included mounds of garbage burning in Dunkirk, a person carrying a giant TV looted in Marseille and a call from a teenager in Strasbourg to subscribe to his account to follow clashes with the police.”

Many regular users who streamed the unrest also gained thousands of subscribers. Young people have been turning to TikTok for their news about the situation on the ground in France.

“On Friday, Emmanuel Macron highlighted the ‘considerable role’ social media played, naming TikTok and Snapchat as having been used to organize violent gatherings and inspiring copycat behavior. ‘Among the youngest ones, it leads to a sort of departure from reality, and we have the impression sometimes that some of them are living out the video games that have brainwashed them in the street’, Macron said.

French ministers amplified Macron’s warnings over the weekend about the effects of social media in encouraging riots and looting. ‘This could partly explain the extremely young age of a number of perpetrators’, said government spokesman Olivier Veran on France Inter radio this Sunday. ‘There seems to be communities and groups competing for followers’, he said. ‘The most painful thing about these images is that people who are filming are generally laughing their heads off’, he said.”