Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, tweeted a cryptic message on Saturday that read, “America has a problem,” which Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur, responded to on the social media platform. The exchange between the two tech moguls attracted attention as they discussed the role social media companies play in America’s issues.
Despite being now an investor in Bluesky, a Twitter-rival app, Dorsey gave no further details about the “problem” he was hinting at.
Musk replied to the open-ended tweet, asking if the problem was “Too many social media companies?” The response drew the attention of netizens, who suspected that Musk was taking a dig at Dorsey for backing Bluesky.
Bluesky was originally incubated at Twitter in 2019, before Musk acquired the company for $44 billion. Today, it is a public benefit organization and, according to Dorsey, “an open decentralized standard for social media.”
It’s noteworthy that Meta Platforms Inc., led by Mark Zuckerberg, is also planning to launch a Twitter alternative named “Barcelona” in the summer of 2023 and that Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, has accepted the challenge thrown down by the Instagram parent for social media supremacy. This year, it was reported that Twitter may experience a user decline in 2023.
Last year, from October to November, the monthly active users of another Twitter alternative, Mastodon, grew from 300,000 to 2.5 million. However, Mastodon proved to be too complicated for mainstream users; the massive influx of interest soon fizzled out.
