Meta jabs Elon Musk as he reveals new Twitter-like app: ‘A platform that’s soundly run’
Meta teased a standalone app in a “reply to Twitter” at a company-wide meeting on Thursday, and a senior executive at Facebook’s parent company has previously taunted Twitter boss Elon Musk in saying the next rival will be “sanely run”.
The app, internally codenamed Project 92, will launch via Instagram and will be called Threads when released, according to The Verge.
The upcoming app was previewed Thursday at a town hall meeting led by Meta product manager Chris Cox, who called the project “our answer to Twitter,” the outlet reported.
Cox is already going after Musk and his management of Twitter, which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO bought in October for $44 billion and has since touted as “a place where all voices are heard.”
“We’ve heard from creators and public figures who want to have a soundly managed platform that they believe they can trust and rely on for distribution,” Cox said during the meeting, according to The Verge.
He said the goal of coding the app, which began in January, was to ensure creators have a “stable place to grow and grow their audience” while creating a platform focused on “safety, ease of use [and] reliability.”
Cox went on to brag about celebrities who have already pledged to use the app, like Oprah, the Dalai Lama and DJ Slime.
Meta will make the app available “as soon as possible,” Cox added.
Project 92 would use Instagram’s account system to autofill user information and integrates with ActivityPub so users of the new app can take their accounts and followers with them to other apps supported by the decentralized social network protocol.
The integration inherently makes the app decentralized – like Twitter rival Mastodon which launched in April and supports independent servers that create their own rules on things like content moderation.
It will be the first interconnected platform of its kind under the umbrella of Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The upcoming app could have a leg up on Twitter due to its alliance with Instagram, which could allow it to tap into the photo-sharing app’s more than one billion users, according to Statista. .
Twitter, meanwhile, has around 360 million users and has been rocked by controversy since Musk took over as boss, halved the company’s workforce, scared off advertisers from the platform. trained and outraged high profile users who made blue checks a pay-to-play feature.
Since April, users who once had their identity verified with a free blue check that distinguished them from imposters now have to pay a monthly fee to keep the valuable badge. The cost of a blue tick now ranges from $8 per month for individual internet users to a starting price of $1,000 per month for an organization.
More recently, Musk found someone “pretty dumb” to succeed him: NBCUniversal rookie Linda Yaccarino.
She will be tasked with supporting advertising revenue which is believed to have fallen 59% this year and will have to scramble to meet sales forecasts – which the struggling company has often missed, sometimes by up to 30%.
Yaccarino assumed the role on Monday – weeks earlier than expected – and has already begun to build a trusted “herd”, starting with former colleague Joe Benarroch, who moved into a business operations leadership role.
