Instagram Threads Set to Launch July 6 Amid Twitter Troubles – The Hollywood Reporter

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Who would have thought that a midsummer holiday week would be one of the most consequential for text-based social media platforms?

In a mess of unexpected strategic decisions, peeling holiday news and pure opportunism, the social landscape is suddenly looking 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 views of tweets caused chaos on the platform, with users not refreshing their feeds, advertisers unsure whether their ads are visible, and Twitter links are broken entirely.

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’s unclear how much of the platform’s strategy will be driven by Musk.

After days of radio silence over the rate limiting, Twitter and Yaccarino published a brief note explaining the move, writing that they limited Twitter’s functionality “so we can identify and eliminate bots and other bad actors which damages the platform.”

“Any advance notice of these actions would allow bad actors to change their behavior to avoid detection,” the statement added. The company also announced that Tweetdeck, a popular interface for Twitter power users, will go behind a Twitter Blue paywall for several weeks, in an apparent effort to drive more subscriptions.

The chaos and strategic moves (all of which served to antagonize a large portion of the platform’s user base), could have been a “blood in the water” moment for Meta led by Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Instagram and Facebook.

Meta is expected to release its own text-focused app 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 closely related to Instagram (users will be able to connect their Instagram followers with Threads). And just as Meta 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 link video, image and text products. together, so to speak.

While Zuckerberg and Musk may or may not fight in a literal cage match in the coming months, they are already engaged in a figurative battle, with Meta testing the weakness that Twitter is showing in its method of limiting its rate.

And then there’s Truth Social, the conservative Twitter clone controlled by former President Donald Trump.

While it remains more niche than Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, it has become a rallying point for Trump conservatives, and a platform where Republicans and conservatives go to gain Trump’s approval. and his cadre of family, friends and advisors.

Trump launched his Trump Media and Technology Group more than a year and a half ago, and then signed a deal to merge with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (a SPAC) called Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), which will take Trump’s company public and infuse it with nearly $1.3 billion in cash raised from its public investors and outside private investors.

Trump (who has agreed to post exclusively on Truth Social for now) has also announced plans for a streaming service, though so far there’s no indication that such a venture is about to launch.

In an eyebrow-raising holiday news (an SEC filing by 5:30 pm July 3), DWAC revealed it has reached an $18 million settlement with the SEC over claims it misled investors.

But perhaps more interesting is what DWAC calls an “interpretative divergence” with Trump’s company in terms of its merger deal. In other words: Trump’s company believes that if the merger isn’t complete by September 8, 2023, it can pull out of the deal. DWAC believes it can extend the timeline by up to a year.

“Although the Company believes it has complied with Section 5.2 of the Merger Agreement, TMTG may disagree and attempt to terminate the Merger Agreement,” DWAC warned investors in the SEC filing.

If Trump’s company terminates the deal, it could pursue an IPO, or seek outside private financing. And that will happen in the middle of a presidential election where Trump is the clear GOP frontrunner, and where there will be further scrutiny of his posts on Truth Social.

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 may get 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 world’s richest men fighting 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 his own platform. And this time the financiers will be more vague.

This is a thread worth following.

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