Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to dislodge Twitter and create a central place for public conversations online. Yet Twitter has remained stubbornly irreplaceable. That didn’t stop him from doing it.
On Monday, his company, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, introduced a new app aimed directly at Twitter territory.
The app, called Threads and connected to Instagram, has appeared in Apple’s App Store, and users can sign up to download it on Thursday, when it was released. The app appears to work like Twitter, with an emphasis on public conversations, with users being able to follow people they already know on Instagram. Some tech experts have called the upcoming app a “Twitter killer”.
Zuckerberg is hitting hard as Twitter is in turmoil. Since Elon Musk bought the social platform last year, he’s tweaked the service by tinkering with Twitter’s algorithm that decides which posts are most visible, eliminating content moderation rules that ban certain types of tweets and revising the verification process that confirms the identity of users.
Then, over the weekend, Mr. Musk imposed limits on the number of tweets his users could read while using the app. He said the action was taken in response to other companies stealing data from Twitter in a process called “scraping.” Twitter users soon received messages telling them that they had exceeded their “rate limit”, rendering the app unusable after a short time. Many Twitter users felt frustrated.
“If there has ever been a more self-destructive owner of a multi-billion dollar company who resents the very customers who determine the success of this company, I don’t know of it,” said Lou Paskalis, Founder and CEO of AJL Advisory, a marketing and advertising technology strategy firm, about Mr. Musk and Twitter.
Meta executives have been discussing how to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter since last year, including creating a competing service. “Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs to regain momentum,” a Meta employee wrote in an internal post last year, according to a December report by The New York Times. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.” »
This resulted in Threads, a spontaneous project spun off from Instagram and internally codenamed Project 92. Users will be able to log into Threads using their Instagram account, according to photo previews of the app displayed in the App. Apple store.
Meta executives have previously described the app as a “reasonably run” version of a public social network, in a not-so-subtle nod to Mr. Musk’s erratic behavior.
Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Threads quickly caught the eye online, with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweeting a screenshot of the app’s data policy and Mr. Musk replying “Yeah.”
A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta launches Threads while facing its own challenges. The Silicon Valley company has invested heavily in transitioning to what is known as the metaverse, an immersive digital world. But this development has been met with skepticism, given that the metaverse is far from mainstream.
In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg has also been cutting spending on Meta and wondering if the company is lagging behind in the AI race. At an employee meeting last month, he tried to rally his employees by explaining the massive layoffs of the past year and laying out a vision for how Meta’s work in the field of artificial intelligence s would fit into his plans for the metaverse.
Despite these difficulties, Meta remains Twitter’s most credible competitor, with significant resources and an audience of more than 3 billion people who use Facebook, Instagram or its other applications. The other platforms trying to take advantage of Twitter’s weakness – such as Tumblr, Nostr, Spill, Mastodon and Bluesky – are all much smaller than Meta.
Facebook and Twitter have been at odds for years in their attempt to capture the latest online conversations. In the early days of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg offered to buy the company, but was rejected. Prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook also made an effort to showcase its live products and news stories at political events and on television.
Since then, Zuckerberg has focused his efforts on streaming live video — an area Twitter has also explored — and trending hashtags to allow users to explore topics that have gone viral. on Facebook and Instagram.
MM. Zuckerberg and Musk could face off another way: in a ring.
According to Dana White, president of the UFC sports franchise, the two men are discussing the possibility of competing in a mixed martial arts match. Although no date has been set, the tech billionaires have privately expressed to Mr. White their desire to compete, and the outlines of the event are emerging.
