At the start of last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.
Revelations from hundreds of internal company documents, known as the Facebook Papers, had drawn sharp criticism from lawmakers, users and civil society groups in late 2021 and forced company executives to appear before Congress. Zuckerberg’s plan to rebrandFacebook as Meta and pivot to the so-called metaverse was met with broadskepticism. And the company’s core ad business was under significant pressurefrom privacy changes made by Apple.
But then, the attention of lawmakers, media and the tech world writ large abruptly shifted to another tech billionaire: Elon Musk.
Musk early last year criticized Twitter, then nearly joined its board, then agreed to buy the company before launching a monthslong and ultimately unsuccessful fight to get out of the deal. The saga, which only continued after Musk completed the deal and pushed through numerous controversial changes, often dominated news cycles. In the process, it seemed to make Twitter’s rivals look better managed and draw away critical attention that might otherwise have been focused on other tech giants, including Meta, as they went through painful layoffs and suffered declines on Wall Street.
This week, however, Zuckerberg notched his biggest win from Musk yet. After years of trying and failing to capture Twitter’s audience with copycat features, Zuckerberg is now capitalizing on Twitter’s struggles with a new app called Threads. Meta’s Twitter clone launched this week to unprecedented success, despite Meta’s history of privacy violations and enabling election meddling, not to mention longstanding concerns that the company and Zuckerberg wield too much power over the social media market.
The app’s overnight success was a direct result of the chaos under Musk’s leadership of Twitter since last October. During that time, he has managed to anger many of the platform’s users and advertisers with his erratic statements, mass layoffs and significant changes to Twitter’s policies. While Twitter users have lamented what Musk’s ownership has meant for the platform, it may be the best thing that could have happened for Zuckerberg.
“Musk has done one thing after another to piss off his own user base,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School.
Some early Threads users even commented on the strange nature of the situation — that they would be eager to join a social network run by one billionaire whose company has faced intense public criticism simply because they were so eager to get away from another.
“It boggles the mind,” one user posted to Threads. “I boycotted Facebook years ago and when I heard about this I joined immediately.”
“Never used [Facebook] nor [Instagram],” another user said, adding that they had to join Instagram for the first time to gain access to Threads. “Last thing I would have EVER expected was to use any platform of Zuckerberg’s
In some ways, Musk’s moves at Twitter may have given Zuckerberg and Meta — as well as other tech companies — cover to take similar actions without as much criticism. Meta announced it would eliminate more than 20,000 employees over two rounds of layoffs, marking the largest cuts in its history. But Meta came off looking responsible compared to Twitter’s mass layoffs by handling the cuts professionally and providing more robust severance.
After Musk restored the account of former President Donald Trump following a two-year suspension that began after the January 6 attack, Twitter faced criticism from civil society civic? groups who called on advertisers to boycott the platform. But Meta, along with YouTube, followed suitseveral months later (although those platforms cited their own risk analyses, rather than Musk’s leadership, in explaining their decisions).