Who would have thought that a holiday week in the middle of summer would end up being one of the most consequential for text-based social media platforms?
In a flurry of unexpected strategic decisions, holiday news dumps and pure opportunism, the social landscape suddenly looks up for grabs (at least for a certain type of platform), and its future remains unwritten.
Twitter’s surprise move over the holiday weekend to rate limit the viewing of tweets caused chaos on the platform, with users unable to refresh their feeds, advertisers uncertain whether their ads were being seen, and links to Twitter breaking altogether.
The text-centric social platform has been undergoing a radical transformation since it was acquired by Elon Musk last year. And while it has a new CEO (in former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino) it is not clear how much of the platform’s strategy is being driven by Musk.
After a couple days of radio silence on the rate limiting, Twitter and Yaccarino published a short note explaining the move, writing that they limited Twitter’s functionality “so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform.”
“Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection,” the statement added. The company also disclosed that Tweetdeck, a popular interface for Twitter power users, would be going behind a Twitter Blue paywall in a few weeks, in an apparent effort to drive more subscriptions.
The chaos and strategic moves (all of which served to antagonize a significant portion of the platform’s user base), may have also been a “blood in the water” moment for the Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.
Meta is expected to roll out a text-focused app of its own on Thursday, July 6 in the form of Threads.
Not much is known about the app, other than the fact that it is text-centric, and tied closely with Instagram (users will be able to connect their Instagram followers to Threads). And just as Meta has used Instagram to launch its TikTok rival Reels (the company said in its last earnings call that users are spending 24 percent more time on Instagram thanks to Reels), it will use Threads to tie the video, photo and text products together, so to speak.
While Zuckerberg and Musk may or not end up fighting in a literal cage match in the coming months, they are already engaged in figurative battle, with Meta pouncing on the weakness being shown by Twitter in its rate limiting scheme.
And then there’s Truth Social, the conservative Twitter clone controlled by former President Donald Trump.
While it remains far more niche than Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, it has become a gathering place for Trump conservatives, and a platform where Republicans and conservatives go to win the approval of Trump and his cadre of family, friends and advisers.
Trump launched his Trump Media and Technology Group more than a year and a half ago, and subsequently inked a deal to merge with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (a SPAC) called Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), which would take Trump’s company public and infuse it with nearly $1.3 billion in cash raised from its public investors and private outside investors.
Trump (who has agreed to post exclusively on Truth Social for now) also announced plans for a streaming service, though so far there is no indication that such a venture is close to launching.
In an eyebrow-raising holiday news dump (an SEC filing just before 5:30 p.m. July 3), DWAC disclosed that it had reached an $18 million settlement with the SEC over claims that it misled investors.
But perhaps more interesting was what DWAC called an “interpretative divergence” with Trump’s company over the terms of its merger deal. In short: Trump’s company believes that if the merger is not complete by September 8, 2023, it can pull out of the deal. DWAC believes that it can extend the timeline by up to a year.
“Although the Company believes that it has complied with Section 5.2 of the Merger Agreement, TMTG may disagree and try to terminate the Merger Agreement,” DWAC warned investors in the SEC filing.
If Trump’s company terminated the agreement, it could pursue an IPO, or seek outside private financing. And that would happen in the middle of a presidential election in which Trump is the clear GOP frontrunner, and where there would be extra scrutiny on his Truth Social posts.
It all adds up to a consequential week for words, or at least word-driven social platforms, with Twitter stumbling, Threads launching, and Truth Social pivoting (or at least preparing to pivot).
TikTok and its short-form video clones might garner most of the headlines (and for that matter the most screen time), but the corporate drama is most intriguing at the intersection of text, influence, and power, with two of the richest men in the world battling over whose text-based platform will win, while a politician who used one of those platforms to rise to the presidency tries to repeat the process with a platform of his own making. And this time the financiers will be more opaque.
It’s a thread worth following.
