- East Timor fights new battles 25 years after independence vote
- Oil prices drop on easing fears over Middle East, most markets rise
- Reoxygenating oceans: startups lead the way in Baltic Sea
- King Charles III heads to Australia and Commonwealth meeting
- Wall Street stocks hit fresh records as oil prices slide
- Strike-hit Boeing leaves experts puzzled by strategy
- NASA launches probe to study if life possible on icy Jupiter moon
- EVs seek to regain sales momentum at Paris Motor Show
- NASA probe Europa Clipper lifts off for Jupiter's icy moon
- 'Unsustainable' housing crisis bedevils Spain's socialist govt
- Stocks shrug off China disappointment but oil slides
- Stocks diverge, oil retreats as China disappoints markets
- Trio wins economics Nobel for work on wealth inequality
- Ex-Stasi officer jailed over 1974 Berlin border killing
- Shanghai stocks gain after stimulus briefing as markets rally
- Shanghai stocks gain after stimulus briefing as Asian markets rally
- Nearly 90, but opera legend Kabaivanska is still calling tune
- With inflation down, ECB eyes faster tempo of rate cuts
- Is life possible on a Jupiter moon? NASA goes to investigate
- Ex-Stasi officer faces verdict over 1974 Berlin border killing
- Role of government, poverty research tipped for economics Nobel
- In milestone, SpaceX 'catches' megarocket booster after test flight
- In a first, SpaceX 'catches' megarocket booster after test flight
- Bangladeshi Hindus shrug off attack worries to celebrate festival
- Ubisoft fears assassin's hit over falling sales
- Vietnam, China hold talks on calming South China Sea tensions
- SpaceX will try to 'catch' giant Starship rocket shortly before landing
- Japan's former empress Michiko discharged after surgery: reports
- Japan's former empress Michiko discharged after surgey: reports
- 'Little Gregory' murder haunts France 40 years on
- Tariffs, tax cuts, energy: What is in Trump's economic plan?
- Amazon wants to be everything to everyone
- Jewish school in Canada hit by gunfire for second time
- With medical report Harris seeks to play health card against Trump
- China-EU EV tariff talks in Brussels end with 'major differences': Beijing
- Buried Nazi past haunts Athens on liberation anniversary
- Harris to release medical report confirming fitness for presidency: campaign
- Nobel prize a timely reminder, Hiroshima locals say
- China offers $325 bn in fiscal stimulus for ailing economy
- Small Quebec company dominates one part of NHL hockey: jerseys
- Boeing to cut 10% of workforce as it sees big Q3 loss
- Want to film in Paris? No sexism allowed
- US, European markets rise as investors weigh rates, earnings
- In Colombia, children trade plastic waste for school supplies
- JPMorgan Chase profits top estimates, bank sees 'resilient' US economy
- Little progress at key meet ahead of COP29 climate summit
- 'Party atmosphere': Skygazers treated to another aurora show
- Kyrgyzstan opens rare probe into glacier destruction
- European Mediterranean states discuss Middle East, migration
- Thunberg leads pro-Palestinian, climate protest in Milan
Twitter chaos leaves door open for Meta's rival app
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."
M.P.Jacobs--CPN