Mark Zuckerberg Plans on Building a Twitter Competition

Following Elon Musk’s messy takeover, Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to make a profit for Meta by building a Twitter competition.  

According to the Times, Facebook and Instagram employees electronically got together in November to brainstorm ideas for creating a text-based app that could compete with Twitter.

According to The Times, a Meta employee stated in a post that “Twitter is in turmoil, and Meta has to find its mojo again, let’s have some of their butter and bread.”

According to reports, Mark Zuckerberg and a group of employees during the brainstorming session considered developing a standalone text-focused app to compete with Twitter, which might be based on Instagram’s technology.

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The staff members also contemplated integrating the text-based feature into Instagram’s current platform as an additional feed similar to Instagram Reels or integrating it into Instagram Notes.

The advent of Instagram Notes

Instagram Notes is a fresh addition to the photo-sharing app that Meta started testing over the summer and has now been made available to a small 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 suggested numerous names for a potential Twitter rival during the discussion, including Realtime, Real Reels, and Instant.

Prior to publishing, Insider contacted Meta for comment, but they did not answer.

It wouldn’t be the first time Mark Zuckerberg’s firm tried to ape another social media site.

Following the testing and shutdown of a different TikTok clone, Lasso, Instagram has also directly challenged TikTok with Instagram Reels, and Zuckerberg has explored transforming Meta’s WhatsApp into a WeChat rival.

In the past, the creator of Facebook indicated an interest in Twitter. In 2008, Zuckerberg proposed paying $500 million to acquire Twitter, but the offer was turned down.

Other platforms vying for an opportunity against Twitter 

Meta and other businesses are hoping to gain from Twitter’s turmoil. Mastodon and Hive, two lesser-known rivals to Twitter, have also entered the fray. Tumblr, a microblogging platform, used the occasion to poke fun at Musk’s ideas for his upcoming social media business.

There has been a great deal of ambiguity around Twitter’s destiny ever since the world’s richest man decided to take the firm private in October.

Musk fired a large portion of Twitter’s management team, including its CEO Parag Agrawal, just hours after taking over. 

After calling on employees to commit to working a “very tough” schedule, the billionaire later let go of roughly half of the company’s workforce, and hundreds more quit on their own.

Online rumours were circulating at the time of the major exodus that Twitter would be more susceptible to disruptions due to losing such a significant portion of its engineers.

Some celebrities departed the platform in the weeks after Musk’s purchase, while sponsors reduced or halted their platform advertising due to concerns about content regulation.

As roughly 90% of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising last year, the social media platform could fail without significant sponsors.

Musk has been working to lure back advertisers to the platform in the interim. Additionally, he has consistently asserted that the site’s user base is at an all-time high.

“The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried,” the billionaire said last month.

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