Mark Zuckerberg won’t kill Twitter

Is Mark Zuckerberg losing his touch? Having just thrown tens of billions at his weird virtual-reality ‘metaverse’, only to see it flop with users, the Meta CEO and co-founder of Facebook appears to be spying another questionable new venture. It’s reportedly called Threads, a cloying techspeak name for what is essentially a rip-off of Twitter. You might think that the last thing the world needs is another Twitter, den of sanctimony and cancellation that it is. But not our Zuck.

Threads appears to be an attempt to capitalise on the unease over at Twitter Towers, as advertisers and high-profile users alike have been rattled by Elon Musk’s unpredictable new leadership and outrageous preference for free speech over censorship. For Twitter’s biggest influencers, those who confuse retweets for public opinion and opposing views for hate speech, the app is not the lovely echo chamber it once was. Meanwhile, advertisers fear their ads will appear next to unsavoury tweets, and Twitter sales have plunged as a consequence.