Elon Musk is doing a perfectly fine job of destroying X/Twitter without outside help. But it’s still worth noting that Meta’s intended alternative, Instagram Threads, has reportedly been downloaded more times than X/Twitter since September with a particular jump at the end of November. Threads is steadily adding new features and will reportedly launch an EU version that will comply with EU privacy regulations.
Twilio is making its third layoff in fifteen months, a 5% cut that will remove about 300 people from the payroll. CEO Jeff Lawson blamed higher spending on go-to-market roles for the Segment CDP, which has not produced the expected results. Some cuts will also reduce sales spending on the Flex cloud-based contact center.
It’s a sad world where consumers must look to Meta for responsible business practices. As a reminder of Meta’s own history, they are contesting efforts by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to add new conditions to the privacy consent agreement reached in 2019 – or, as the FTC probably sees it, to comply with the spirit of the original agreement. Taking a page from a century-old right-wing playbook, Meta is arguing the FTC’s enforcement structure is fundamentally unconstitutional, so it should have no authority regardless of Meta’s behavior.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.