Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to dislodge Twitter and provide the central place for online public conversation. Yet Twitter has remained stubbornly irreplaceable.
That hasn’t stopped Mr. Zuckerberg.
On Monday, his company Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, teased a new app aimed directly at Twitter’s territory.
The app, which is called Threads and is connected to Instagram, appeared on Apple’s App Store on Thursday, where users can sign up to download. The app seems to work much like Twitter, with an emphasis on public conversations, where users can follow people they already follow on Instagram. Some techies have called the upcoming app a “Twitter Killer.”
Mr. Zuckerberg strikes as Twitter undergoes fresh turmoil. Since buying the social platform last year, Elon Musk has transformed the service by tinkering with Twitter’s algorithm that determines which posts are most viewable, scrapping content moderation rules that ban certain types of tweets, and creating a verification process. revised that confirms the identity of users.
Subsequently, Mr. Over the weekend, Musk put limits on the number of tweets his users could read when using the app. He said the move was in response to other companies using Twitter’s data in a process called “scraping.” Twitter users soon started getting messages that they had exceeded their “speed limit”, effectively rendering the app useless after a short while of viewing messages. Many Twitter users became frustrated.
“If ever there was a more self-destructive owner of a multibillion-dollar company who resents the customers who drive that company’s success, I am not aware of it,” said Lou Paskalis, founder and CEO of AJL Advisory, a marketing agency. and advertising technology strategy firm, said of Mr. Musk and Twitter.
The latest turbulence on Twitter seems to have given Mr. Zuckerberg an opening for Threads.
Meta executives have been discussing how to capitalize on the chaos on Twitter since last year, including setting up a rival service. “Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” a Meta employee wrote in an internal post last year, according to a December report from The New York Times. “LET’S GET THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”
That has resulted in Threads, a crash project that originated from Instagram and is internally codenamed Project 92. Users can log into Threads with their Instagram account, according to photo samples of the app displayed on Apple’s App Store.
Meta executives previously characterized the app as a “healthily run” version of a public-facing social network, in a not-so-subtle joke about Mr. Musk’s erratic behavior.
Mr Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Threads quickly gained online attention, with Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders, tweet a screenshot of the app’s data policy and Mr. Musk responds“Yes.”
A Meta spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta launches Threads as it takes on its own challenges. The Silicon Valley company has invested heavily in the transition to the so-called metaverse, an immersive digital world. But the move has been met with skepticism, as the metaverse is far from mainstream.
In recent months, Mr. Zuckerberg also cut costs at Meta and wrestled with questions about whether the company is lagging behind in the race for artificial intelligence. At an employee meeting last month, he tried to rally workers by explaining last year’s mass layoffs and outlining a vision of how Meta’s work in AI would meld with his plans for the metaverse.
Even with those challenges, Meta remains Twitter’s most credible competitor, with deep pockets and an audience of more than three billion people using Facebook, Instagram, or its other apps. Other platforms trying to capitalize on Twitter’s weakness, such as Tumblr, Nostr, Spill, Mastodon, and Bluesky, are all much smaller than Meta.
“Even though Facebook is in decline, it still has a huge user base,” says Paskalis of AJL Advisory. The sheer number of users, he added, will make it more likely that his copycat apps will “achieve success at Twitter’s expense.”
Facebook and Twitter have been at odds for years in trying to capture online conversation down to the minute. In the early days of Twitter, Mr. Zuckerberg offered to buy the company, but was turned down. Before the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook also took a big step to showcase its live products and trending topics in political events and on television.
Since then, Mr. Zuckerberg has focused on livestreaming video — an area Twitter has also pursued — and trending hashtags to let users discover topics that have gone viral on Facebook and Instagram.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Musk can take it another way: in the ring.
The two men discuss the possibility of sparring in a mixed martial arts match, according to Dana White, president of the sports franchise Ultimate Fighting Championship. While no date has been set, the tech billionaires have privately spoken to Mr. White let it be known that they are willing to fight each other, and the outline of an event takes shape.
