Twitter's New Rival Threads’ Success Would Create the Ultimate Monopoly for Zuckerberg

Twitter's New Rival Threads’ Success Would Create the Ultimate Monopoly for Zuckerberg

Meta Platforms' launch of Threads — the challenger to Twitter — had a successful launch this week, with a reported 30 million downloads.

Twitter has been in an advertising and user freefall since its purchase by Elon Musk due to the allowance of hate speech, the decline in tech performance, and the new limitation of how much a user can read without paying a fee.

The early success in downloads of Threads may raise questions about Meta’s overall dominance. The company already owns most of the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. 

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“The superpower that Threads has that Twitter doesn’t is that it doesn’t need to learn about the 30 million users who subscribed to the platform overnight,” said Molly Lopez, chief executive of ad agency Sparo told the WSJ. “Chances are that from their Instagram, Facebook, and even WhatsApp activity, Threads already knows quite a bit about you.”

CNN already dubbed Threads the “Twitter Killer.” Musk’s attorneys have fired off cease and desist letters to Meta threatening legal action and claiming the platform is a “copycat.”

 

Cicilline Took on Big Tech and then Quit

In October of 2020, then-U.S. Congressman David Cicilline (RI-CD1) Chair of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, issued a scathing report on the anti-competitive business models of America's four largest tech giants — Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

This year, Cicilline quit Congress to take a $ 650,000-a-year position as the head of the Rhode Island Foundation — an organization created to help Rhode Island's most needy.

Since the report was issued, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms.

The report cited that according to Facebook’s internal market data, Facebook’s family of products were by far the most popular social media sites by Monthly Active Persons (MAP) as of December 2019.

"The social network marketplace is highly concentrated. Facebook (1.8 billion users) and its family of products—WhatsApp (2.0 billion users), Instagram (1.4 billion users)— have significantly more users and time spent on its platform than its closest competitors, Snapchat (443 million users) or Twitter (582 million users).483 TikTok is growing quickly and is often referenced as evidence that the social media landscape is competitive.484 Although it meets the broad definition of social media as a social app for distributing and consuming video content, TikTok is not a social network," stated the report.

Now, Meta is moving to crush one of its major competitors for advertising dollars and users. In June, the New York Times reported that Twitter’s ad revenue fell 59% in one year.

"The state of Twitter’s advertising is crucial because ads have long made up 90 percent of the company’s revenue. After Mr. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October and took the company private, he vowed to build 'the most respected ad platform.' But he quickly alienated advertisers by firing key sales executives, spreading a conspiracy theory on the site and welcoming back barred Twitter users," reported The Times.

The other major social media competitor is the Chinese government-owned TikTok which is under fire for sharing the data of Americans with the Chinese government.