The past few years for Twitter have been… turbulent.
In 2021, the company permanently suspended former president Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
A year and a half later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought the company, and lifted the ban but began tampering with the algorithm – all with the goal of making the company more profitable.
Musk’s antics at the helm of Twitter have led to a number of similar apps launched to challenge Twitter’s spot as the go-to place for bite-sized, up-to-the-minute content. Our tech expert, Omar Gallaga, joined the Standard to discuss the upstarts.
Highlights from this segment:
– Turmoil at Twitter over the past few years has given rise to a new crop of apps looking to take its place as the internet’s “town square” – Bluesky Social, Spill and Threads being some of the biggest
– Threads, which was launched by Meta and is linked to peoples’ Instagram accounts, has managed to grab a lot of media attention and users due to the size of the company.
– The long-term viability of Threads, or any of the other social networks challenging the dominance of Twitter, is still an open question. Gallaga feels as if the “era of microblogging” could be winding down.
