Threads Loose

If you've been checking the news recently you may have seen that amid the many tales of Chinese and Indian floods, treasonous former Presidents, warring Soviets and hottest recorded days on Earth (sit down, that's not actually a cause for celebration...), one story has risen to the top of many a feed, capturing the public imagination in a way that the existential threat of nuclear war or climate change-induced extinction can't possibly hope to do …. two world-famous billionaires have threatened to have a little roll around to see who's the hardest. Bless.

It was recently reinstated richest person on Earth, Elon Musk who challenged Facebook founder (and suspected android / alien / aliendroid) Mark Zuckerberg to a Las Vegas cage fight. Zuck, recently revealed to have been training (and competing) in Jiu Jitsu and said (by himself admittedly) to have completed the gruelling Murph fitness challenge in under 40 minutes accepted.
The fact that each of them heads up a rival social media platform responsible for most of the news (real and otherwise) disseminated globally adds a juicy wrinkle of complexity to what is essentially a pissing contest between two grown men. The playground square-off began ramping up in light of Zuck's announcement that Meta were developing a direct, “saner” alternative to Twitter, a platform already mired in controversy before Musk bought it up and dropped a whole lot of crazy into the mix.
Whether the ultimate goal of the tech-heads' proposed cage match is to promote their own physical superiority (imagine how many times these guys got called nerds by the tough kids at school...) or simply their respective business interests (many commentators think the match won't happen, though Dana White, head of the UFC remains optimistic), the internet is thirsty for it.

Since handbags were drawn, Meta's latest offering, Threads, has launched to stunning early success, pulling in over 100 million users in just the five days since its July 6th launch and that's without any help from Europe. Privacy laws currently prohibit it, though the UK gets it. Another stunning victory for Brexit....

Easily becoming the fastest growing app in history, its incredible numbers are largely attributed to the near-ubiquitous nature of its launchpad, Instagram. By signing up via their pre-existing Insta accounts (currently the only way to play), users have been able to migrate much of their existing network of contacts onto the new platform and avoid that feeling of being the new kid on the first day of school. For its part in the whole sorry saga, Twitter's steady decline is largely due to the alienation many have felt as the platform's become overrun with hate speech, social polarization, manufactured outrage, bots and trolling. Analysts blame the ad revenue model and its need to game our attention for $$$s as a fundamental factor in this moral decline. Outrage and misinformation are proven to spread more quickly and effectively than boring old truth (approx six times according to research models) so before we know it, we're all wading through the mud so someone else can get rich. As well as doubling down on the ad model, Musk has limited users' access to daily posts and implemented an unpopular subscription model for verified accounts. His trademark bullishness, tempered by worrying, very public flip-flopping has driven both the user base and his coveted advertisers into the hills... or at least the arms of the competition.

At least for now (though don't count on it remaining so – business is business!) Threads is ad-free. The price you pay of course is your privacy, handing over reams of your private data, including purchases, contacts, search histories, health bios, physical location, financial information.... all such sweet nectar to Robo-Zuck and his data-harvesting horde and no doubt shared across Meta's various other platforms with their advertisers.

Monetization (or rather, conspicuous monetization) of Threads has been touted by Zuckerberg only once a “clear path to 1 billion users” is achieved, a lofty goal, though still a mere third of Facebook's gargantuan monthly base. Adam Mosseri, Insta's head honcho said they intended to do so whilst focussing the app on “light subjects” such as fashion, sports, design and music, though conceding challenges will present themselves in the shape of hard news, politics and the type of divisive rhetoric which has so maligned Twitter, the clear rival they claim they're not aiming to replace with their “friendly” alternative. Musk obviously isn't feeling too friendly about any of it, the gloves coming off (long before they go on, if they ever do...) with inflammatory, derogatory tweets - “Zuck is a cuck” among the less tasteful – and predictable, though purportedly baseless threats from Musk's lawyer, Alex Spiro of an imminent lawsuit. In a cease and desist letter he cites “systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation" of Twitter's trade secrets and IP” as well as scraping of Twitter's data. (If you don't know what scraping is, ask ChatGPT...), claiming Meta have nabbed former Twitter employees with insider information used to build their “copycat” site. For their part, Meta deny the accusations, claiming “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee” and intellectual property experts suggest Spiro's grumpy letter provides an insubstantial basis for a trade secrets lawsuit.

Whether or not they hopped over to Meta, there's certainly a decent pool of disgruntled former Twitter employees, with roughly ¾ of Musk's toys unceremoniously thrown out of the pram in the chaotic first few months of his acquisition (Twitter's value now estimated at roughly one third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it!)

Regardless of what happens next with Threads, there'll be some staunch support for Robo-Zuck if we ever get the billionaire cage-rage event the internet is thirsting for.
What a time to be alive.