Does the world need another social media app? Apparently so.
Meta, the company run by Mark Zuckerberg, is set to launch Threads on Thursday – a “text based conversation app” to rival Twitter.
This should come as no surprise: Twitter has been floundering for the best part of a year, ever since Elon Musk took over as owner in October 2022. Reports say its value has plummeted by two thirds while Musk’s stance on free speech and his rules and costs – which pop up like Whac-A-Mole – have resulted in disgruntled users jumping ship in droves.
This includes A-list celebrities who once used the platform religiously as a way of connecting with fans, promoting new work or simply revealing facets of their personality that PR-controlled media interviews either didn’t allow or could not accommodate as well as politicians and journalists.
Twitter has been an increasingly integral part of the news cycle since it was launched by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in July 2006. By 2010 Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. Servers would crash during unprecedented international events, such as Michael Jackson’s death as they struggled to keep up with the speed at which people wanted to tweet his name. When two high profile people – such as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher who were early adopters of the platform when they were married - tweeted one another the platform would glitch.
Tweets have been sent from space. Tweets have started global movements including #metoo. Twitter has been a place for high profile people to make apologies. Culture wars play out here. News breaks here.
So, where did it all go wrong?
While Twitter was never perfect (see trolling, doxing and hate speech for more details) the deal breaker does seem to be Musk.
He acquired Twitter for $44 billion (£34 billion) in October 2022 and promptly fired executive level staff members and reduced the workforce from 8,000 to 1,500 prompting concerns about the platform’s stability. Musk also gave himself the username Chief Twit and tweeted “The bird is freed”.
This was a clear reference to his plans to allow Twitter users more liberty in terms of what content they could post, in a bid to prevent the platform becoming “an echo chamber”. Musk, a free speech absolutist, had spoken prior to his takeover about how he would consider revoking the platform’s suspension of Donald Trump when he was at Twitter’s helm.
This bullish introduction resulted in the first wave of celebrities logging out for good.
Whoopi Goldberg, Toni Braxton and Gigi Hadid were among the first to go, with the latter explaining in an Instagram post that her decision was as a result of Twitter “becoming more and more of a cesspool of hate & bigotry.”
“I can’t say it’s a safe place for anyone, not a social platform that will do more good than harm,” she added.
In early November 2022 Ryan Reynolds quit Twitter – where he had some 20 million followers – and joined blogging site, Tumblr (where he was met with varying degrees of hostility from users who ‘greeted’ him with salutations like “welcome to the hellsite Ryan” and “get off my lawn. I am hissing like an irate goose”).
In December 2022, Elton John announced he was leaving, too, telling his 1.1million followers: “I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.”
In less than a year, Musk has implemented a host of changes to how Twitter works. One of the biggest is the removal of the blue tick – which signifies a verified user – to be replaced by Twitter Blue, a subscription service.
This was, obviously a bid to make money but also, according to Musk, a means of promoting equality on the platform.
In what was dubbed a ‘bonfire of blue ticks’ by one tabloid, in April this year Twitter began removing the symbol from high profile users who refused to pay for them, such as Kim Kardashian, Hillary Clinton and Pope Francis.
Most users who lost their blue ticks took it on the chin, as actor Ben Stiller joked: “No blue check, still feel like me.” Meanwhile, singer Charli XCX said: “Officially no longer an officially verified artist. I love being unofficial and unverified. It’s very moi.” However, it was further evidence of Musk’s power and how ruthlessly he could change the game.
And there was more change afoot. Just last weekend Twitter set a limit on how many tweets each user can view. Depending on how long users have been active, and if they are verified or not, between 300 and 6000 posts can be viewed per day.
These limits are, according to Musk, temporary and are there to tackle “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
This has caused outrage among users and #RIPTwitter did some serious trending.
Meanwhile, TweetDeck, a popular post scheduling service will go behind a paywall in the next few weeks.
The sense of instability at Twitter since 2022 has led to several apps resembling Twitter including Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Mastodon and Bluesky popping up.
A handful of celebrities seem to have joined Bluesky but not left Twitter - Chrissy Teigan is one such example (her pinned Tweet is a link to her Bluesky account), as is US democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The only other social media platform swarming with celebrities is Instagram, though that’s largely visual. Perhaps this explains why Zuckerberg will be linking Threads to Instagram: Meta has seen an opportunity to give disillusioned Twitter users a viable alternative.
It remains to be seen whether the slew of A-listers who have logged out of Twitter for good will give Threads a chance, but one thing’s for certain: there’s a market for it.
