Is Mark Zuckerberg losing his touch? Having just thrown tens of billions at his weird virtual-reality ‘metaverse’, only to see it flop with users, the Meta CEO and co-founder of Facebook appears to be spying another questionable new venture. It’s reportedly called Threads, a cloying techspeak name for what is essentially a rip-off of Twitter. You might think that the last thing the world needs is another Twitter, den of sanctimony and cancellation that it is. But not our Zuck.

Threads appears to be an attempt to capitalise on the unease over at Twitter Towers, as advertisers and high-profile users alike have been rattled by Elon Musk’s unpredictable new leadership and outrageous preference for free speech over censorship. For Twitter’s biggest influencers, those who confuse retweets for public opinion and opposing views for hate speech, the app is not the lovely echo chamber it once was. Meanwhile, advertisers fear their ads will appear next to unsavoury tweets, and Twitter sales have plunged as a consequence.

He seems intent on offering the easily offended elites of Elon Musk’s Twitter a more comfortable Safe Space

Enter Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It has reportedly been developing Threads since Musk’s buyout, and according to tech site the Verge it has similar features to Twitter’s ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’. Meta has also been wooing the Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey and other celebs to bring their hefty followings over to the new app. The idea is that if even a fraction of the billions who regularly use Instagram or Facebook move to Threads, it could leave Twitter – with just 368 million monthly active users – in the dust.

It’s still a tall order. Not least because even Twitter has long struggled to make Twitter a success. The genius of Facebook and Instagram lies in their ability to reach ‘normies’ – ordinary folk keen to share their holiday snaps and chat with friends and family. Twitter, on the other hand, is set up to feed an entirely different beast: members of the laptop class with far too much time on their hands to scan all those Twitter ‘threads’ and argue the toss with bots. I’m caricaturing, but only a little. And I can’t help but wonder if Twitter’s relatively modest success speaks, in part, to the fact it fits perfectly around the lives of only a narrow section of society.

Perhaps Zuckerberg can succeed where others have failed, hoovering up all of those disaffected tweeters horrified that Musk has loosened up the speech codes a bit. Zuckerberg has certainly been ruthless in going after his rivals in the past. He acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, bolstering his empire and absorbing his competition. And when he can’t buy up his rivals, he just copies them, with a brazenness that would make the CCP blush. After he tried and failed to acquire Snapchat in 2013, he reportedly just lifted its ‘Stories’ feature for his own platforms. Snapchat took a huge hit. (He has been preoccupied with Twitter ever since he tried to buy it in 2008.)

But, if nothing else, Threads reflects a dearth of vision over at Meta HQ, at a time when the company really needs some. Its homegrown apps have failed to catch on. The metaverse, which seemed designed only to appeal to incels, has proved to be a costly disaster. All this caps a difficult few years for the firm, culminating in thousands of layoffs. Last year, $80 billion was wiped off Meta’s value overnight due to a bad earnings report. Meanwhile, its public standing has been severely damaged by the outrageous political censorship on its platforms.

In response, Mark Zuckerberg just seems to be chasing elite fads. He’s bungled his way into AI, much later than his competitors. And now, with Threads, he seems intent on offering the easily offended elites of Elon Musk’s Twitter a more comfortable Safe Space. Meta, this tech behemoth, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But I can’t help but feel that Zuckerberg and Co, these supposed masters of the universe, are bang out of ideas.