July 5 – In this day and age, social media companies are huge. From Facebook and Meta to Twitter and Instagram, everyone is sharing photos and thoughts and opinions on these platforms.
Now Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has created Threads.
Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “This came out of nowhere over the holiday weekend. Apparently Facebook has been quietly developing a new platform that they think will take over and eclipse Twitter. They’re citing all of the problems with Twitter, all of the frustration that users are having.”
Threads will launch tomorrow.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chairman of Facebook and Meta, is very openly saying this is an effort to try to knock Twitter out of the space.
Barkdoll said, “They think the market is very ripe right now to get a lot of people to leave Twitter to move to Threads. This would include journalists and all these people who have millions and millions of followers so it’ll be interesting to see how that unfolds tomorrow. We know that there have been competitor’s attempts in the past that have not been very successful. This one may feel a bit different because of who it is.”
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM noted, “I want to actually talk about that decision by the judge on social media and government interaction because I would bet Threads is trying to push out Twitter with the idea that they will have that same kind of interaction with the government. Let’s face it, Facebook does. Instagram is probably influenced by that, too.”
Anthony Panasiewicz of NewsTalk 103.7FM said, “We don’t know pretty much anything for Threads itself other than its Facebook and Meta, but it’s not going to be off of Facebook, it’s going to be off of Instagram and make it a text-based Instagram kind of, not clone, but same infrastructure. I think because the other thing we saw with Twitter over the weekend was they had that issue with rate limits. So I’m an avid Twitter user and I didn’t hit any of the rate limits, but there was a thing where Elon, who has publicly come out with everything for better or for worse, publicly saying everything, he said that they were having issues with data scraping. So one thing that came forward was AI was scraping the data off of all of these tweets and essentially getting more info for the AI. He wanted to stop that, but that really backfired because people were able to see maybe a couple hundred tweets before they were locked out for the day, which automatically gets you issues with how many people are accessing Twitter and then number two, how do the advertisers feel about this? I feel like it’s almost like a perfect storm.”
Barkdoll added, “Twitter is limiting how many tweets you’re allowed to read a day, but then if you pay I think $8 or $9 a month, you get more access. Musk really has some challenges here. I don’t think advertisers are crazy about its management. Again, is Zuckerberg looking at a way to exploit that to maybe try to peel off not only users but advertisers as well? We’re going to find out.”
Jansen said, “Let’s tie that into that Missouri case because we’re finding out maybe George Soros is involved in getting this new Threads thing up. So you have a lot of money there if he’s doing that. They could be very successful actually. But we know there’s been this government interaction, very criticized, and now we have this judge coming out with a scathing result on that.”
A federal judge over the weekend has said the Biden administration was too heavy handed in interacting with social media companies, trying to control what they posted or would not post during COVID.
Barkdoll said, “Part of this order is no more contact between the White House and the social media companies. Again, we’ve known for the last few years there was a lot of this going on behind the scenes, but this is the first time a court has stepped in and actually sanctioned the White House for doing so.”
Panasiewicz said, “So the thing that I see with Instagram and Meta in general coming in, is they’re going to have that influx of capital and it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time because, one, we’ve seen all of these Twitter competitors. There was Mastodon for like a hot second, there’s Trump’s social media with Truth Social. There’s a bunch of different competitors, but I don’t think they should be called competitors, because they’re not on the same playing field in terms of user base, in terms of accessibility, in terms of how many people are doing that. The blessing is Facebook has that structure. Meta has that structure, but they also have the capital, but we don’t know where that capital is coming from and we know they have a history, right?”
Barkdoll said, “I think you’re touching on why this time is a huge difference than like Mastodon, Truth, these are companies that were starting from scratch, from zero. They organically have to build up all these users. Remember Meta between Instagram and Facebook, they have billions of worldwide users already. So depending on how this Threads is set up, they’re going to plug this thing in tomorrow and they’re instantly going to have a user base that far eclipses any of these other platforms. That in addition to their, what seems like endless resources, capital, is where this one feels like it’s different from some of those prior efforts.”
