Former Army Undersecretary Patrick Murphy says artificial intelligence companies need to choose a side with Varney & Co.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, unveiled a new “conversational” app called Threads on Monday that appears to be mimicking Twitter – a direct challenge to Elon Musk’s social media platform.
A listing for the app, called Threads, appeared in Apple’s App Store, suggesting that it would launch as early as Thursday, July 6th. It’s touted as “Instagram’s text-based conversational app,” with the entry touting a Twitter-like microblogging experience.
Threads appeared on Apple’s App Store and indicated that it would launch as early as Thursday, July 6th. (Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
“Threads are communities where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics that interest you today to the trends of tomorrow,” it said.
“Whatever interests you, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things – or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.” added the app store description.
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Users, who must be at least 12 years old, can keep their Instagram account and usernames and follow the same accounts in the new app, according to screenshots in the App Store listing.
Instagram users can keep their usernames and follow the same accounts in the new app, as per screenshots in the App Store listing. (Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
A privacy policy provided on the App Store indicates that Metas Threads may collect data from users including but not limited to: health and fitness, financial information, contact information, search history, and location.
Twitter collects information from users during their use of the platform, when users provide the information directly and when Twitter receives data from a third party, the Company Privacy Policy says.
In this illustration dated July 13, 2021 the Twitter app is seen on a smartphone. (Portal/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo / Portal Photos)
Twitter has rolled out a number of unpopular changes over the past few days, including rate caps on the number of tweets users can see.
Musk imposed the rate limits because of “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, saying that Twitter “scraped so much data that it was affecting the user experience!” The rate limits gradually increased from 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts and 600 posts per day tag for unverified accounts to 10,000 for verified users and 1,000 for unverified users.
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When users reached their limits, they received error messages like “rate limit exceeded” or “tweets could not be loaded” because tweets failed to load and users’ feeds failed to fill with new content.
Musk attributed the cause of excessive dating scraping on Twitter to artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraping data to train their models.
“Almost every company running AI, from startups to some of the largest corporations in the world, has siphoned off vast amounts of data. It’s quite annoying to have to bring a large number of servers online in an emergency just to facilitate the outrageous evaluation of an AI startup,” Musk said in a tweet.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk during the EEI 2023 event in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. The purpose of the event is to address the major challenges and opportunities facing electrical companies today. (Photographer: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Twitter has also published a requirement that users must be verified in order to use the TweetDeck online dashboard.
The policy, announced on Monday, takes effect in 30 days and appears to be aimed at generating additional revenue as users will have to pay to have their accounts verified under Musk’s changes. Popular with businesses and news organizations, TweetDeck allows users to manage multiple Twitter accounts.
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Twitter and Meta did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Fox News’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.