Meta Plans A Rival To Twitter

Uploaded on 2023-03-14 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, FREE TO VIEW

Meta, the parent firm of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a new standalone, text-based social network app in its bid to displace Twitter as the global market square. The aim is to rival both Twitter and its decentralised competitor, Mastodon. Twitter has been struggling to hold on to its advertising base since Musk took over the platform in 2022.

Numerous corporate advertisers have withdrawn spending following Twitter's move to restore suspended accounts and release a paid account verification which resulted in scammers impersonating firms. A Twitter-like app would allow Meta to take advantage of the current problems with the Elon Musk management of the company, where operational changes and cost-cutting have been having an impact on users' experience.

Meta's app will be based on a similar framework to the one that powers Mastodon, a Twitter-like service which was launched in 2016 its user base from 300,000 users to more than 2.5 million in the weeks after Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in late October. Twitter's growth has slowed in recent months, in part as users struggle with the somewhat less user-friendly nature of a the platform resulting from Musk's changes to the platform.

Meta's new app will be decentralised and designed to be unable be run in the form of a single entity - a similar concept to Mastodon and comes at a time when its biggest platform, Facebook, is struggling to attract the attention of a younger audience.

Meta has been preoccupied investing in the Metaverse, a virtual world where users interact and work - which has yet to come to fruition. Its video-sharing app, Instagram, is also facing stiff competition as content makers or hit influencers abandon the platform for TikTok. To date it is unclear when Meta will launch the new app.

Mastodon: Reuters: BBC: CNN: Daily Mail: Sky: NYPost: Mashable:

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