twitter owner elon musk tweeting, competition is fine, cheating is not. meta s communications director responding on threads, no one on the threads engineering team is a former twitter employee. threads already dubbed by some industry insiders as the twitter killer, threatening to lure away its 330 million active users. meta co-founder mark zuckerberg posting, wow, 30 million signups as of this morning. and that number continuing to climb. celebrities from nick jonas to kim kardashian entering the chat. it is almost an exact clone of twitter. there s even a little retweet button with the little circular arrows. the biggest difference is that elon musk is not the owner. reporter: you can download threads and import your bio, your contacts, and verification straight from your instagram account. and lynn see, it s no secret that many have been looking for an alternative since musk acquired twitter, and experts point out that meta has been successful in the past at
if isis did that, you wouldn t sit there and say, well, i don t believe isis is really in the military. you would say, my god, we have to make sure isis is not in the military. they can t even bring themselves to do that. it s very revealing that even though white supremacists in the form of people like david duke can be defeated, white supremacy as an ideology is still very much an active force in our country. right, and christina, tommy tuberville, quite a glaring admission. in his mind, white nationalist just means maga and trump supporters. that s interesting. but you also talk about a party that is led in some ways by tucker carlson, who laundered white replacement theory, the great replacement theory onto fox news and who is now repeatedly, with his retweet button, launders white supremacy, wild conspiracy theories on twitter. they are about to come together to do business for trump to take his show to twitter. it does feel like tommy
everybody against everybody. that s why i use the metaphor the tower of babble. it s not red against blue. it s a fragmentation of everything. that s the way it s felt since about 2014. was this the intention of the platforms that you referenced? no. it certainly wasn t their intention to destroy society. but it was their very clearly stated intention, worked into their bonus plans that, hey, engineers f you can think of a way to increase engagement, you get a bigger bonus. and so, i think that s especially what threaded comments were, that s what the retweet button was. and i don t know if they knew originally that anger is the best way to increase engagement. i don t attribute bad intent. they were just following a business imperative to increase engagement, keep people on the platform, keep the platform growing. we know that facebook did know that its platform was increasing polarization. they had a unit studying it and shut it down. reporting from the wall street journal says
what happens on twitter doesn t affect real life but it can distort perceptions of reality by amplifying the extremes and undermining our ability to reason together. it brings to mind a new article in the atlantic titled why the past years in life has been stupid. its author jonathan hite places a lot of blame on tribal organization on social media and mob mentality. quote, social media is a product of far left and far right. creating a system that looks less like democracy and more ruled by aggression. it s an environment we created and can still fix. the retweet button and the like and share functions is the beginning of the mess we re in because it incentivizes outrage and group. we ve all seen the problems, but what are the solutions? the conservatives have been
that happen all the time in media. then you have stories that i think are it s not that they didn t get duped, it s that they didn t really do the work. it s just like i got duped, you know, when they said, you have your tonsils out, you get to eat all of the ice cream you want. but ice cream hurts my teeth. it doesn t feel good on a hole in your throat. so, what s happening here is they have local journalists, they don t get paid that well. the stories are used for free on social media. they get to keep all of the ad revenue. so people are pressed for time. they don t have time to check the facts. basically, when the national news hears a feel-good story, they click the retweet button, they don t do any due diligence themselves. that s why i don t trust any good news. i only like bad news. all bad news is real. it s true. tough world. hard to make a fake obituary. i tried. the hypocrisy kills me.