It's an easy way to get clicks when the world's richest man challenges the ninth richest to a cage fight. But it's actually win-win for them if the owner of Twitter and the founder of Facebook have us debating whether we are Team Musk or Team Zuckerberg, instead of the outsized power the pair enjoy thanks to the concentration of popular, mostly unregulated social media platforms in the hands of a few.
We ask about Mark Zuckerberg's Wednesday launch of Threads, a microblogging site to rival Twitter and about the delayed rollout in Europe, where the courts on Tuesday struck a blow to parent company Meta's monetization of users' personal data. Can it be a global conversation if there are different rules in different regions? What sets Threads apart from other attempts to dethrone Twitter?
And more broadly, how to build better social media in an age where the pressure to perform and the ability to spread disinformation at the speed of light have upended the very essence of how we see ourselves as human beings?
Produced by Charles Wente, Juliette Laurain and Imen Mellaz.
