Twitter's Final Boss: Zuckerberg Wages War

I am become Thottr, the destroyer of worlds. Last night Meta launched Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s hotly-anticipated Twitter clone, and almost immediately blew a 10 million-person sized hole in the endless debate over Twitter’s fate: will the House that Dorsey Built survive a little more freedom of speech, or will this be the end of the most hated company in tech press history (to which journalists all, of course, remain hopelessly addicted)? Enthusiasm for this latest clone, not only from the press but also from the industry, has been deafening, and for good reason. The truth is, Elon’s Substack nuke never made much sense, nor did the media’s obsession over every other fake Twitter. But Meta is a proven clone assassin; Meta’s Instagram, the backbone of Threads, operates at the scale of something like 2 billion users; and the company is helmed by the most seasoned and successful social media executive in history. From Jack’s inaugural “just setting up my twttr” 13 years ago, this is the first real challenge the platform has ever faced. If Zuckerberg’s challenge fails, it will likely be the last. But if Zuckerberg succeeds, and Twitter declines, there will not be another conventional social media challenge to state power in our lifetime.