The unspooling of Twitter

NEW DELHI: This week, social media got excited about the launch of Threads, an app by Meta positioned to compete with Twitter. Unfortunately, and callously, it has been presented to us as a corporate war between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. A war is when two thugs prompt thousands of young men and women slaughter each other in the name of nationhood, always a specious ruse to murder, as we are seeing in Ukraine and Yemen.

Musk and Zuckerberg are not thugs. They are highly accomplished men who have created great companies that employ tens of thousands of tech-skilled professionals who do some wonderful things. What Masters Elon and Zuck, to use their popstar names, are fighting is a good old school cafeteria pie fight, replete with comic-book one-liners and onomatopoeic insults. What else could one call this joust, especially after it started off with Elon challenging Zuck to a caged fight, and Zuck responding with a request for location.

At last count, Threads toted up 90 million sign-ups in just four days of life. That’s nearly a third of Twitter’s users. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months, TikTok in nine, and Meta’s Instagram in 24, so Elon 0 – Zuck 1. Clearly, Threads has been boosted by its association with Instagram, whose 2.25 billion users can sign up in just three clicks and export their existing network to the new app instead of having to start from scratch. Apart from the Insta faithful, a good number of Threads sign-ups are Twitter exiles who have become fed up with Musk’s quirky management of the social media platform ever since he bought it for $44 billion last year.

Musk has sacked and mocked 70 per cent of the staff, changed rules according to his whims, and opened the floodgates to trolls in the name of free speech. His quixotic ways have turned Twitter into a chaotic platform where blue ticks are pointless because anyone can buy them.

However, there are deeper issues in this spat. On the face of it, Threads is challenging Twitter’s monopoly and landing a blow for free speech. An alternative platform on which people can express their opinions freely without being distracted by Musk’s capricious ways is welcome. But then, it must be remembered that Meta is just as monopolistic as Musk wants Twitter to be. Its free speech policies have bowed to every tyrant on the planet; its data privacy practices are being investigated by the European Union, and its response to any challenge to its market dominance has been amoebic—surround and devour.

These characteristics are not unique to Meta or Twitter. It’s a modern mystery how duplicity seems to be in the very nature of internet platforms. Their outcomes invariably are the opposite of their promises. They stole in promising a global democracy where everyone’s opinion counted, but today we have countries in thrall to despots. Be it Google or Meta or YouTube, each has curried legitimacy by claiming to open up opportunities for everyone’s enterprise, but ended up becoming the biggest monopolies the world has ever seen. They claim to be public opinion platforms but are also the tools by which propagandists have corrupted every debate of the day and birthed modern tyrants.

Elon v Zuck is not a corporate war, it’s a rich schoolboy scuffle. In time, one of them will fade or be vanquished and the winner will open the doors wide to influencers, propagandists and dictators.