After 11 years as free service, Twitter mulls subscription option
history, email and social media IDs and names of children, siblings and ex-spouses.
These groups marked for extreme vetting will vary across countries, as Tillerson’s cables left that determination to be made by US law enforcement and intelligence officials .
The rules are to apply to applicants in all but 38 countries covered by the visa waiver program that include almost all of Europe and allies such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan.
Trump promised to tighten scrutiny of visa applicants to keep “bad dudes” out of the US, reeling back an extreme position he took earlier proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the country.
Some of these cables, as internal diplomatic communications are called, were about implementing Trump’s order temporarily freezing new visas for citizens of six Muslim-majority nation, but were rescinded because of court orders.
Chirag Patel, an immigration lawyer in Maryland, said these new instructions are bound to make entry into the United States more difficult, adding, it, entry, was “Already pretty bad. Could/ Will get worse.”
Twitter Inc is considering whether to build a premium version of its popular Tweetdeck interface aimed at professionals, the company said on Thursday, raising the possibility that it could collect subscription fees from some users for the first time.
Like most other social media companies, Twitter since its founding 11 years ago has focused on building a huge user base for a free service supported by advertising. Last month it reported it had 319 million users worldwide.
But unlike the much-larger Facebook Inc, Twitter has failed to attract enough in advertising revenue to turn a profit even as its popularity with US President Donald Trump and other celebrities makes the network a constant centre of attention.
Subscription fees could come from a version of Tweetdeck, an existing interface that helps users navigate Twitter.
Twitter is conducting a survey “to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck,” spokeswoman Brielle Villablanca said on Thursday.
“We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we’re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals.”
The decision by a handful of high-profile consumer brands to pull advertising from Google’s YouTube over offensive content could threaten the site’s longterm strategy of stealing ad dollars from television, analysts said on Thursday. The immediate financial impact of the controversy is likely to be limited. But with “brand safety” emerging as a major concern for marketers amid a surge in hate speech and other types of offensive content across the internet, the widespread assumption that major advertisers are ready to shift large chunks of their budgets from TV to digital now looks much more dubious. REUTERS