Google, the parent company of Meta, announced Friday that it is developing a new ‘text sharing’ social networking site, which might compete with Twitter.
Since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter in Oct, the platform has experienced outages, layoffs, and advertisers have fled due to a lack of content moderation. Yet, no big alternative to Twitter has developed thus far, leaving world leaders, politicians, celebrities, and businesses with no choice but to continue communicating via the network.
Meta Wants To Compete With Twitter
Following rumors on online newspapers Platformer and Moneycontrol in India, Meta acknowledged on Friday that construction on the new platform had begun. According to media reports, Meta’s new app would leverage technologies to make it interoperable with the specialized network Mastodon and other platforms, allowing users to broadcast posts to individuals on other networks.
This would be a significant departure from the norm for tech behemoths, where sites like Instagram and YouTube are locked behind technical walls and run on company servers under rigorous controls.
Mastodon is powered by decentralized computer servers, with no single management or authority making decisions. Musk momentarily prohibited Twitter accounts that gave connections to other social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon, in December.
According to Moneycontrol, Meta’s new initiative is being evaluated with features such as tappable links, user bios, verification badges, and shared photographs and videos.
Twitter experienced a brief but unexpected outage on Monday, with users worldwide claiming that they could no longer see articles that linked from other websites.
The problem was blamed on “unintended effects” from a platform update, according to the company’s technical support account. Twitter is functioning on a skeleton crew after numerous waves of layoffs saw more than two-thirds of its staff let go, leaving it exposed to outages in addition to misinformation and dangerous content.
