As Twitter users get increasingly disgruntled with a platform owned by a controversial billionaire which has imposed temporary reading limits and has suffered countless outages, the CEO of the social media network has insisted the site’s community is “irreplaceable” as individuals flock to rival apps. After Mastodon, Post and Bluesky all stepped up to the plate to try and pull people away from the bird app, Instagram’s text-based alternative Threads has proven to be the next high-profile competitor – so much so, that Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg revealed 10 million people had signed up in the first seven hours of it going live this week. And Twitter’s certainly alarmed by its growing popularity. Owner Elon Musk has criticised the amount of data the app may collect on users and accused it of “cheating” amid reports of a lawsuit against Meta, and now, CEO Linda Yaccarino has stressed “everyone’s voice matters” on Twitter. The ex-NBCUniversal advertising chair – who was appointed to the top job back in May and didn’t issue a single tweet during the platform’s ‘rate limit exceeded’-related outage earlier this month – wrote on Thursday: “Whether you’re here to watch history unfold, discover real-time information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others – on Twitter you can be real. “You built the Twitter community. And that’s irreplaceable. This is your public square. “We’re often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Although the post makes no explicit reference to Threads, it was shared just hours after the rival app landed on Google Play and the App Store, and Yaccarino’s mention of “real-time information” comes as the initial version of Threads’ home feed is non-chronological and instead generated by an algorithm. However, sharing a screenshot of a tweet from Musk in which he claimed a “closed-source, algorithm-only system” means “manipulation” of information is “essentially undetectable”, Instagram head Adam Mosseri clapped back: “If anyone was asking, both Instagram and Facebook have chronological feeds options, so yes, we’re going to bring one to Threads too.” So that’s that, then. And looking at the replies to Yaccarino’s tweet, many aren’t convinced by her argument – not even the blue ticks paying a monthly fee for additional features: Oh, and if all of this wasn’t bizarre enough, there’s talk of a cage fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Yes, really. No, we can’t believe it either. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 6, 2023--

A top engineer at Twitter has announced he is quitting his role with the company following the glitch-ridden launch of Florida governor Ron Desantis’s 2024 presidential campaign on the social media platform. “After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday,” Foad Dabiri, who was an engineering chief at Twitter, tweeted on Thursday. The Twitter engineer’s exit from the company comes a day after Mr DeSantis’s long-anticipated 2024 campaign bid for the White House on a Twitter livestream. Mr DeSantis’s campaign launch announcement on Twitter Spaces – the platform’s audio group-chat feature – was marred by a a host of glitches, including long silences and persistent echoes. The Twitter app reportedly crashed for several users who tuned in to listen to the announcement and at one point the Republican governor himself disappeared from the livestream. Mr Musk – who had boasted about several overhauls to the microblogging site since his takeover of the company to make Spaces better – shut the initial Spaces event and started a new one. The second event where Mr DeSantis read a short speech, reportedly gathered fewer listeners than the first, attracting about 161,000 people, according to Twitter’s public-facing data. The buggy event, according to many users on the social media platform, is a reflection of how Twitter under Mr Musk is far from operating smoothly. Since Mr Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he has laid off nearly three-fourths of the company’s workforce, following which the platform has faced several technical issues. Earlier this week, a bug caused tweets deleted by some users in the past to resurface on their timelines, and weeks earlier, many users complained that they were unable to post images and share external links. Mr Dabiri was the engineering lead at Twitter’s Growth Organisation. He tweeted on Thursday that during his stint with the company, he “experienced two distinct eras” before and after Mr Musk’s takeover. “And then came ‘2.0.’ What an extraordinary journey it has been. To say it was challenging at the outset would be an understatement,” Mr Dabiri said. The engineering chief however did not comment on why he was leaving Twitter, and whether it is linked to the problems with the DeSantis livestream. Both Twitter and Mr Dabiri did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment. “Working with Elon Musk has been highly educational, and it was enlightening to see how his principles and vision are shaping the future of this company,” he tweeted. Read More Ron DeSantis news – live: DeSantis floats pardoning Trump and Jan 6 rioters after ‘train wreck’ Twitter launch AOC jokes more people watched her gaming online than listened to glitch-ridden DeSantis launch DeSantis pushes past embarrassing campaign start, outlines travel schedule for early state visits AOC jokes more people watched her gaming online than listened to DeSantis launch What is Twitter Spaces and why did it go so wrong during DeSantis’s 2024 launch? What are Elon Musk’s political beliefs?

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