Mark Zuckerberg could launch his own rival platform to Twitter in the coming months – all part of his master plan to capitalize on the chaos and user discontent led by Elon Musk.
Facebook’s parent company Meta began coding the new social app, codenamed Project 92, last January, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox said at a company-wide meeting earlier this month.
And big-name celebrities are already in talks to post on the platform, including broadcast legend Oprah Winfrey and Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama — an odd decision after the Buddhist icon had a bizarre “suck-my-tongue” incident in the past happened spring.
“We’ve heard from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” Cox told Meta staff, offering thinly veiled criticism of Musk’s Twitter activities.
According to The Verge, the dig drew cheers from Meta’s assembled staff.
News reports suggest that the public name for Meta’s new app could be Threads. There will reportedly be a 500 character limit per post in threads, in line with Twitter’s original ethos
The Dalai Lama apologized last April after disturbing video surfaced on social media of him kissing a small Indian boy on the lips before asking him to “suck” his tongue. The Tibetan religious leader is one of the most high-profile celebrities in talks about joining Meta’s Twitter rival
The rich, famous and influential, Cox said, are desperate for a new platform “that they think they can trust and rely on to propagate.”
According to reports, the new app’s publicly-facing name could be “Threads” and that, like Twitter, it will feature a continuous text scroll and buttons similar to both the “Like” and “Retweet” functions.
Threads are also moving closer to the original Twitter limit of 180 characters, offering a slightly longer but still short limit of 500 characters per post. As one social media industry insider put it, threads will “look remarkably similar to Twitter.”
Many regular Twitter users, as well as the platform’s large community of scientific experts, academics, and even former NASA astronauts, have also been looking for alternatives in recent months.
Mastodon — a free, decentralized, and open-source microblogging platform — has increasingly become a haven for scientists hoping for more level-headed conversations among themselves.
“I was a lot more active there than I was on Twitter,” said European Space Agency Science astronomer Mark McCaughrean late last year after moving to Mastodon himself.
Many have described the platform as a more democratic alternative than Twitter, as Mastodon’s decentralized structure means no single person, company, or server has full control over operations.
Many Twitter users, scientific experts and even former astronauts have also been looking for alternatives in recent months. Former NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez pledged to jump off the platform, while Musk plans to turn “Blue Check” verification into a pay-to-play scheme
Big celebrities are already in talks about making their posts available to Meta’s new Twitter rival, codenamed Project 92, including Oprah (right) and the Dalai Lama (left).
Last November, Mastodon reported over 70,000 new signups in a single Friday, in direct response to Musk’s completed $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
“If it gets too toxic and abusive,” said Emory University virologist Boghuma Titanji amid Twitter’s violent transition also to Science, “I will leave to preserve my welfare and consider other platforms.”
Former NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez vowed to jump off the platform as well, as Musk plans to turn “Blue Check” verification into a pay-to-play scheme, though Hernandez is doing so anyway remains an active tweeter to this day.
But Musk has also received praise from the likes of Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Senator John Kennedy on Capitol Hill, who see the billionaire as a free-speech advocate campaigning for the revival of First Amendment rights in the United States platform deployed.
Senator Kennedy said last December that Musk had taken a “very bold stance on the First Amendment” since taking over Twitter. “He’s hard as a pine knot.”
“Project 92,” which Cox specifically described as “our answer to Twitter,” will integrate with Instagram’s current account system and allow Instagram users to automatically push their followers and user information directly to the new microblogging site.
According to Cox, it will also be integrated with Mastodon and other decentralized platforms that use the same ActivityPub API system as Mastodon.
The app’s design looks “remarkably similar to Twitter” or really old Twitter, according to social media consultant Matt Navarra, as Musk’s version continues to experiment with everything from longer posts to newsletters to exclusive live broadcasts.
Navarra, who claimed to have internal knowledge of Meta’s plans, told the Sydney Morning Herald that Meta’s Twitter killer could launch as early as “late this month or early next month.”
“They’ve been integrating people for a while,” Navarra said. “I know for a fact that they spoke to a British celebrity and some big US stars.”
However, the only name Meta’s chief product officer named Cox as a lock on the new platform was Minneapolis, Minnesota-based music producer DJ Slime, who Cox boasted had signed on to use the app.
Cox told company staff that Meta’s goal for “Project 92” was to build an app with “security, ease of use, and reliability” in mind, to ensure developers have a “stable place to build and maintain expanding their audience”.
Meta, Cox said, will release the app “as soon as we can.”