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Meta working on Twitter's alternative to gain from Musk-led chaos
Meta's Facebook and Instagram and other smaller social media start-ups see the Twitter chaos as an opportunity to grow.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion less than two months ago and since then, questions have swirled around the company about how viable the tech platform might be as Musk has laid off thousands of employees, started changing the platform’s content rules, and proclaimed that the company is in such dire financial shape that bankruptcy is possible.
As per a New York Times report, competitors of Twitter have seen the chaos at Twitter as a viable opportunity. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has hosted virtual brainstorming sessions with its employees to discuss how to build the next Twitter.
Apart from employees at Meta, former Twitter workers have begun projects for what they say could be the next Twitter. Start-ups like Post and niche services like Mastodon and Hive Social have also reared their heads, as has the microblogging platform Tumblr.
Some of these services are presenting themselves as less toxic versions of Twitter. Just how toxic the platform is, and will become, has been a massive focus lately. Musk reversed suspensions of a swath of users that had been previously banned, typically for violating terms such as hate speech, hateful conduct, abusive content, and others.
Since Musk stepped in, some users have already said they would leave the service. Others have discussed wanting to migrate somewhere else.
One alternative service that gained immediate attention in the US is Mastodon. It is known as a federated platform and functions as a collection of social networks. Since the beginning of last month, Mastodon accounts have grown nearly 33 percent to six million, reveals the report.
Last month, Hive Social, a social network founded in 2019, also more than doubled its users, to 1.8 million. More established social media companies are also working to take on board the waves of people departing Twitter. Tumblr, the microblogging website, posted a “reasons to join Tumblr” thread about a week after Musk’s takeover of Twitter.