SOCIAL MEDIA

Meta reportedly working on a competitor to troubled Twitter platform

By our News Team | 2023

US media reports say the project is already far advanced, with the aim of creating a ‘sanely run’ alternative to Twitter.

Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is reported to be far advanced with a strategy to create its own replacement for the troubled Twitter platform owned by Elon Musk.

This will be a standalone app that is likely to be named ‘Thread’. Currently it is simply known internally at Meta as ‘Project92’.

Illustration courtesy of Twitter

Reports of the new social media platform have been published by The Verge, a US-based news website that covers the technology industry. The website said it had watched a company-wide Meta meeting at which the project was discussed with employees.

“The forthcoming app, which, in the meeting today, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox called ‘our response to Twitter’, will use Instagram’s account system to automatically populate a user’s information,” The Verge reported.

Demand from creators and public figures

“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run [and] that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution,” Cox is quoted as saying.

He said the company’s goal for the app was “safety, ease of use, reliability” and making sure that creators have a “stable place to build and grow their audiences”.

Cox added that Meta already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime (a renowned name in the music industry) and was in discussions with other big names, including Oprah and the Dalai Lama.

“Twitter is experiencing financial problems as an advertising-reliant business. An advertiser boycott was triggered by concerns including the deterioration of moderation standards at the platform and a botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription service, which led to a slew of verified impersonator accounts,” the London-based The Guardian newspaper reported.

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