The Meta Mirage

It’s been a week since Threads, Meta's latest social media platform, has been launched, and despite being a significantly inferior product to Twitter (as of right now), it has become the fastest product to amass over 100 million users in history. This phenomenon can be linked to the public's increasing disillusionment with Elon Musk, Twitter's current CEO, and businesses’ preference to engaging with a platform that is far less unpredictable. However, there seems to be collective amnesia about Mark Zuckerberg's history and Meta's contentious track record. As with anything else, the old has to make way for the new, but this “simulacra”, as the 20th century philosopher Jean Baudrillard has coined, has effectively masked reality to such a degree that the public can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff.

Threads and Twitter offer platforms for social interaction and public discourse, but differ in key aspects. Twitter, with its concise format and unmoderated approach, has been seen as a bastion of free speech. This has obviously appealed to the conservative established which has been shunned from the boardrooms and universities since Donald Trump’s election in 2016. While many now associate conservatism with conspiracy theories and bigotry, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Yet, figures like Elon Musk have proudly taken on the conservative mantle in an attempt to become “free speech heroes”, completely discrediting one of the establishment’s guiding principles: upholding institutions that we can trust. As James Madison so beautifully expressed in America’s Federalist Papers:

The term institutions is a figurative one to describe collectives of individuals that democratically ensure that certain principles are upheld—such as the peaceful transfer of power, trust in the scientific establishment, and respect for the judicial system. All of this is imperative for a democratic society of millions to survive upheaval.

Yet, here we are—debating what has already been debated for millennia, since the days of Plato in Ancient Greece, all the way to 1770s Philadelphia, and more recently with the fall of the Soviet Union. But humans have a fleeting memory.

When Musk bought Twitter for an obnoxiously stupid amount of money, he promised people that the platform now would not censor “out of bounds” ideas, which the previous management took great care in moderating. Despite Elon’s reassurances that hate speech had not risen since loosening censorship, over and over again respectable institutions such as the New York Times have found that harassment of minorities has spiked significantly since the takeover. It’s difficult to determine who’s right, but if I were to pick a source it would not be the guy who’s $44 billion dollars are at stake.

This type of trend was obviously alarming to brands, whose ads now were being shown next to racist and bigoted tweets. This is what in marketing we call “brand safety”. Companies spend billions of dollars to build their brands’ reputations, which were now being put in jeopardy by appearing within harmful contexts. It’s an inevitable side-effect of free speech—but no one said that free speech was good for business.

In a media environment where over 90% of Twitter’s revenues were coming from advertisers, kicking down the gates of moderation was an idea doomed to fail. Instead, Musk has resorted to a product-mentality of layering on a subscription model that essentially accomplished the same as the previously free version did. And on he went committing a series of missteps that further drove Twitter to the ground: non-credible blue checks, Elon’s antics, unsustainable debt servicing amounts, gigantic poorly done layoffs, and many more.

The last nail on the coffin came when Elon Musk announced that free users were only going to be able to see a maximum of 600 tweets per day.

Enter Mark Zuckerberg—the man who invented social media.

It’s important to pause here and reflect on Zuck’s path up to this point. Here’s a guy who turned a silly dorm social media platform into a global ad publishing behemoth that rolls in over $100 billion in revenues each year. He’s managed to accomplish that not by innovation, but rather by acquisitions and by effectively copying the competition. In 2012, Meta acquired Instagram for $1 billion; in 2014 it acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion; in that same year, it acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion; and the list goes on.

But here’s what’s important to remember: in a fast-paced world where obsolescence occurs at far greater speeds than ever before, the new always has a shot at overtaking the old. However, the social media business doesn’t quite follow this truth—people will spend years nurturing their followings in order to monetize them, so when Mastodon and other platforms tried to offer an alternative to Twitter, no sane person was willing to attempt to rebuild their audiences from scratch. And that’s the in that Meta saw.

Instagram has an user base of over 1 billion people. That’s 4 times as many as Twitter’s total monetizable base. So, by launching an identical app to Twitter’s but making it seamless to transfer all of your followers over, Zuckerberg took down arguably the biggest barrier to change.

All it will take is for Threads to convert 1 in 4 Instagram users to amass a monetizable base as large as Twitter’s. And with more eye balls, comes business and more money.

Brands know what to expect from Meta. They’ve battled, debated, and profited from its publishing platforms for years. Facebook and Instagram to date have arguably the most effective social media marketing targeting and content consumption experience out of all platforms (with TikTok right at its heels). It’s no wonder that out of Meta’s $110 billion+ a year revenues, 97% of it comes from their ad business.

And despite Meta’s horrendous track record of toppling democracies, facilitating ethnic genocides, increasing teenage depression and young girls’ suicide rates, selling user’s data to untrustworthy actors, and spreading copious amounts of dis- and misinformation, businesses still feel more comfortable with them than with Elon’s Twitter.

So, if you ask me why I believe Threads will be a success? It’s simple: moderation. If companies can protect their brands while still getting millions of impressions within an ecosystem they’re familiar with, the choice is a simple one to make. And despite all of the horrendous effects Meta has had in our society, brands have a short-term memory, much like their fellow consumers.

In our postmodern world, culture is dominated by “simulacra” and the hyperreality they generate—a condition where the representation or simulation doesn't just refer to, replace, or mask reality, but becomes reality itself. It's the phenomenon where the symbol, the representation, is more significant and "real" to us than the actual thing it represents. Therefore, the idea that Twitter is bad for business, quickly became synonymous with “Twitter is bad.” When one platform holds the mantle of evil, all others look like angels—even Facebook.

The public's and brands' shift from Twitter to Threads, despite its perceived shortcomings, underscores Baudrillard's theories in the contemporary digital landscape. The sway of hyperreal narratives, the commodification of political affiliations, and the constant quest for novelty collectively shape our relationships with social media platforms. This interplay offers a stark reminder of the complex societal dynamics driving consumer and corporate choices in an increasingly interconnected world.

PPA