Alex Bruno
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is reportedly considering developing a decentralized social media platform that focuses on text-based sharing to compete with Twitter.
The new platform, codenamed p92, would be accessible through Facebook and Instagram and would feature familiar social media features such as verification badges, followers, and likes.
Meta believes that there is an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.
Meta’s plan to create a new social media platform comes after Elon Musk, the billionaire, bought Twitter last year.
Since acquiring the social media giant, Musk has revealed a number of scandals that took place at the company before his acquisition.
In December, Musk released internal company communications, known as the “Twitter Files,” from around the 2020 U.S. election cycle.
The files showed how the company used unprecedented tools to suppress reporting on the contents of Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The files also revealed that Twitter executives struggled internally to justify censoring the laptop story after the fact.
The Twitter Files further exposed that the social media site secretly put users on blacklists to limit the reach of their content.
The files reviewed by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss showed how Twitter limited the spread of certain users’ tweets. Weiss posted photos that apparently showed an internal Twitter dashboard where several users were labeled with “blacklist.”
Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of COVID-19 lockdowns, was on a “Trends Blacklist” that prevented his tweets from trending, and right-wing radio host Dan Bongino was on a “Search Blacklist.”
According to a survey conducted by Quinnipiac University, 37 percent of Americans approve of how Musk is operating Twitter, while another 37 percent disapprove, and 25 percent did not provide an opinion.
The survey also found that roughly 55 percent of respondents disapproved of the way the world’s richest man handles purported misinformation.
