Better Off Thread
The world is burning. Democracy is teetering. Quick, choose a Twitter replacement!
People know that Meta is loose with our personal information, did little to stop the spread of false information during the election, let Cambridge Analytica harvest user data, has been used to incite violence around the world, suffered record fines for privacy violations, failed to stem political manipulation of governments around the world, and exhibited patterns that led whistleblowers to explain in detail how the company puts profits over people. Along with these and other scandals, we also know that Meta has a long and pathetic history of directly copying other company’s products, and because of its scale some of these efforts have been successful. But we need our social media dopamine hits, we miss the community, and, in the end, we hate Elon more than Zuckerberg. So, like swaths to a flame, tens of millions of users have logged onto Threads, which is a basically a 2007 version of Twitter backed by the popularity of Instagram and the scale of Facebook. But social media is about quantity, not quality. The product features will come. In the meantime, Threads is where the people are. Can it ultimately defeat (or at least damage) Twitter? It’s possible, in large part because Twitter’s new owner seems so intent on that defeat. I’m a sick, needy addict that desperately misses the retweets and likes that once coursed through my veins, so yes, you can find me on Threads (using a phone with the Threads app installed), along with pretty much every other Twitter clone. I announce my presence there with the pride of a junkie in a back alley spending his last few bucks on a few hits of weak-ass dopamine cut with chagrin because access to the good stuff dried up when Twitter was sold. So give me, give me, I need, I need. This is the internet now, where we get to choose between Elon and Zuck. They’ve threatened to fight each other in a cage match. But we’re the ones trapped in the cage.
+ Related from Steven Pearlstein in WaPo (Gift Article): Here’s the inside story of how Congress failed to rein in Big Tech. “Over the past 30 years, the processes and norms that once allowed Congress to discover what the country wanted and needed have so badly eroded that few members can remember how it’s done.” (Who are we kidding? Members of Congress spend all day trying to go viral on social media just like the rest of us…)
