Twitter has been besieged by upstarts seeking to steal its status as the most popular microblog, and now Zuckerberg has entered the ring.
Elon Musk’s mismanagement of Twitter has opened the door for a cottage industry of Twitter-clones hoping to take over the platform’s status as the place for news and politics. Most have been short lived hypes lacking staying power, but recently Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched its first new social media since Facebook in the form of Threads. Threads has not yet launched in Europe but it has become a major social network in the US with over 80 million users already. It remains to be seen whether threads can overtake Twitter as the premier microblogging site, but the fact that there is a serious challenger to Twitter is an interesting development. It’s also worth asking why now?
Let’s start with that. Meta has been a giant in the social media game for a decade and a half, and yet the company has only ever really launched one social media: Facebook. While Whatsapp and Instagram are important parts of Meta’s business they were both bought as opposed to developed in house. The association with innovation that Silicon Valley firms tend to have is ironic in Meta’s case; after all the company doesn’t launch many new products and the one it has launched since Facebook, Horizon Worlds, has been neither very innovative nor very well received. The reason why Meta has rested on its laurels is that the structural forces governing the social media industry strongly favours having a few monopolistic platforms dominating a certain form of expression. Due to network effects it just makes the most sense for users to elect one platform as the place to be as it is cumbersome to check several distinct platforms which fill the same niche. Meta obviously knows this so the fact that they decided to launch Threads means that they sense blood in the waters.
The net isn’t big enough for the both of Twitter and Threads, so expect the turf war to be over quickly. I won’t speculate on which platform wins, but I think a period of active competition will greatly benefit users who will be wooed by both sides with new features and quality of life improvements. Despite the mess Musk has wrought, it’s a good time to be on Twitter. It’s a shame social media is so hostile to competition; especially given how hostile social media firms tend to be towards their users in terms of data harvesting.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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