Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey appears to have rejected Mark Zuckerberg’s follow request on Threads, as billionaire social media rivalry took a comical turn.
Threads is a new social media platform from the Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta. Launched on July 5, the Twitter competitor amassed 150 million downloads in record time, eclipsing ChatGPT to become the fastest growing application in history.
Also read: Twitter vs Threads: Has Zuck Got Musk on the Ropes?
Dorsey unmoved by request
Jack Dorsey was not impressed by the Meta CEO’s follow request and didn’t care responding to it on Threads. Instead, the billionaire posted a screenshot of the request to his 6.5 million followers on Twitter, a platform he founded.
“Zuck requests to follow you,” a note next to the photo reads, indicating that the screenshot showed a follow request sent on Threads.
“Too soon b,” the former Twitter CEO wrote in a caption. As of writing, Dorsey’s ambiguously cheeky comment has been viewed more than 7.6 million times and garnered 59,000 likes.
Too soon b pic.twitter.com/uhD8ZkvdxB
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2023
The Zuckerberg snub comes just days after Dorsey took potshots at Meta’s Threads, a new text-based social media app built on top of Instagram. Dorsey publicly criticized Threads, arguing that it is a privacy-invading copycat of Twitter.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones,” he tweeted, in response to a post that highlighted several Twitter-like platforms, including Threads.
In the same thread, a user pointed out that Jack Dorsey had created two clones of Twitter. However, the billionaire entrepreneur clarified that Bluesky and Nostr are protocols that Twitter could use to build a better platform, rather than compete with it.
Block him Jack!
Dorsey’s response to Zuckerberg drew a slew of hilarious comments from users on Twitter – which apparently limited the number of tweets that people could see on the platform just days before the launch of Threads.
‘Block him jack,’ said one user while crypto investor Greg light-heartedly offered a statement that sounded as though it was from the Meta founder and CEO. “‘Hey I made this new app and I kinda regret it – do you have any advice?””‘ he said.
“hey I made this new app and I kinda regret it do you have any advice”
— greg (@greg16676935420) July 16, 2023
On Threads, Dorsey’s account, linked to his Instagram, is private and has no followers. Mark Zuckerberg may have sent a follow request to Dorsey automatically, as an opt-in feature that connects a user’s Instagram followers to Threads.
Anti-social billionaires
Dorsey’s apparent rejection to connect with Mark Zuckerberg on Threads is ironic in that he built platforms that are designed to encourage social interaction. It suggests that the Twitter founder may not be as committed to the ideals of social media as he would have us believe.
Since stepping down from his role at Twitter in 2020 and then selling the company to Elon Musk in 2022, Dorsey has expressed concerns about the power that social media firms have over people. He believes social media should be used to “bring people together.”
Now, he is keeping his long-time rival at bay. It is not only Dorsey who is refusing to interact with his fellow billionaires. Former U.S. President Donald Trump built his own social media network Truth Social after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook.
Musk reinstated Trump’s account after he bought the platform last October, but the former president has refused to post anything on Twitter, where he had millions of followers. Mark Zuckerberg resumed posting on Twitter only recently when he took Musk’s challenge for a cage fight, ending a 12-year hiatus.
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