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Facebook Parent Company to Challenge Twitter With New Platform, Plan to Use Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama to Promote

Published: June 21, 2023
  |   By Cassandra MacDonald

Facebook parent company Meta hopes to challenge Twitter with a competitor code named “Project 92.”

Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox announced the project to employees during a company-wide meeting earlier this month.

According to reports, the company is planning to try and lure users over by courting big-name celebs, including Oprah Winfrey and Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama’s inclusion has been criticized online due to a video of him telling a small child to “suck my tongue” recently going viral.

During the announcement, Cox did not hold back from throwing shade at Twitter owner Elon Musk.

“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” Cox told Meta employees, according to a report from The Verge, who watched the meeting online.

According to a report from the Daily Mail, Cox also said that “the rich, the famous and the influential” are desperate for a new platform “that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution.”

According to Mario Nawfal, the host of the largest Spaces on Twitter, the new app will likely be called “Threads.”

Nawfal wrote, “META’s chief product officer Chris Cox described Project 92 as ‘our response to Twitter’ and mentioned that it will allow Instagram users to automatically transfer their followers and user information straight to the new app.”

“Cox threw shade at [Musks ‘s] Twitter by claiming Meta’s ‘been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,'” Nawfal continued. “This is ironic, considering the WSJ’s investigation a few weeks ago into the proliferation of Child Pornography rings on Instagram and Facebook. And let’s not forget, Meta is the same platform that censored the Lab leak theory and the Hunter Biden laptop.”

The Meta app is rumored to be a continuous scroll of posts, like Twitter, and will have features similar to the “like” and “retweet” functions.

The Daily Mail reports, “Threads will also hew closer to Twitter’s original 180-character limit, offering a slightly longer, but still short 500-character limit per post. As one social media industry inside put it, Threads will look ‘remarkably similar to Twitter.'”

The platform will also be synched with Instagram so that users can automatically carry their followers over. It will also be compatible to sync with Mastodon and other decentralized platforms that use the same ActivityPub API system.

Social media consultant Matt Navarra told the Sydney Morning Herald that he has seen the app and that it is expected to launch “at the end of the month or beginning of next month.”

“They have been onboarding people for a little while,” Navarra said. “I know for a fact they’ve been talking to a British celebrity, and some US big name stars.”

Musk responded to the news on Twitter, writing, “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options. At least it will be ‘sane.’ Was worried there for a moment.”

In a subsequent tweet, Musk added, “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”

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