A recent article in The New York Times has claimed that Meta is trying to cash in Elon Musk’s chaotic attempt to take over Twitter. According to the publisher, their plan is to develop a competitor application for Twitter to act as a rival for the platform for the same niche.
The Times said that in November, Facebook and Instagram, employees met virtually to develop ideas for a text-based app that could compete with Twitter.
According to The Times, a Meta employee stated in a post that “Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back.”
“LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER,” they allegedly declared.
The group of employees has brainstormed about making a separate text-focused app that might be based on Instagram’s technology. The Times says that Instagram’s staff also thought about adding the text-based feature to Instagram’s current platform as an extra feed like Instagram Reels or to Instagram Notes.
Instagram Notes is a fresh addition to the app that Meta started testing over the summer and has now been made available to a selected number of users. Users can now post momentary, brief text messages to “close friends” or followers who follow them back using the new feature.
Employees at Meta also tried to come up with names like Realtime, Real Reels, and Instant for a potential Twitter competitor.
It’s not Zuckerberg’s first attempt at imitating a social media platform. For example, after Lasso, another TikTok copy was shut down by Facebook, Zuckerberg thought about making Meta’s WhatsApp a WeChat competitor.
Other platforms are also looking to capitalize on Twitter’s instability. For example, Mastodon and Hive, two lesser-known rivals to Twitter, have also entered the race.
Tumblr a microblogging platform, that used the occasion to poke fun at Musk’s ideas for his upcoming social media business.
This was an expected move from the industry as Twitter had been going up and down ever since Musk took over. He even fired a large portion of Twitter’s management team, including its CEO, Parag Agrawal, just hours after becoming the CEO.
He asked the employees to commit to working an “extremely hardcore” schedule, and then let go of roughly half of the company’s workforce. Hundreds more quit on their own.
Followed by Musk’s ownership of Twitter, celebrities left, and sponsors cut back or stopped advertising on the platform because they were worried about content regulation. As roughly 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising last year, the social media platform could fail without major sponsors.
However, he has been trying to bring sponsors back and says that the users have been at an all-time high.
The billionaire stated in a previous statement, “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”