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Mark Zuckerberg has been busy. Last week, he announced his future plans for Meta, which included halting all independent fact-checking efforts and relaxing moderation of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech. Through the days that followed, Meta removed accommodations for transgender employees from its office bathrooms, scrubbed LGBTQ+ themes from Messenger, softened its misinformation filters, junked its diversity initiatives, and bade goodbye to its vice president of civil rights while reassigning its chief diversity officer to an “accessibility and engagement” position. Meanwhile, Zuck ramped up his online interactions with far-right influencers like Benny Johnson, went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to bemoan a supposed lack of “masculine energy” in corporate America, and kept up his regular Mar-a-Lago meetings with Donald Trump (in part to negotiate a possible resolution to Trump’s post–Jan. 6 lawsuit against Facebook).

This has resulted in a lot of upset users, employees, and associates. TechCrunch reported on a massive uptick in Google searches from users looking up how to delete their Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts, and seeking alternatives to those platforms. (Among them: Pixelfed, a community-supported Instagram alternative that reported “unprecedented levels of traffic” over the weekend.) This mass deletion push has been encouraged by Hollywood celebrities like Mia Farrow, Alex Winter, and Cord Jefferson, all of whom have publicly announced farewells to their Instagram and Threads accounts. One of the attorneys defending Meta’s A.I. models from a lawsuit brought by aggrieved authors dropped Meta as a client and announced he was deleting Instagram and Threads, citing his displeasure at “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.”  Zuckerberg has dismissed such platform departures as “virtue signaling.”

All of this may feel like déjà vu to social media users who remember the aftermath of Elon Musk’s 2022 Twitter takeover, which spurred a mass exodus of liberal users, and the rage that erupted last year as the website now known as X became a full-on Trump propaganda den and hive for neo-Nazis—which, in the wake of the 2024 election results, inspired even more users to leave, including me.

Here’s the funny thing about that: Remember what major company positioned itself as a ready refuge for these disaffected tweeters post-2022? That was Meta, yup, which coordinated a massive celebrity-supported rollout for its Twitter clone, Threads, in July 2023, with Zuck stating his goal of turning it into “a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.”

Threads initially benefited from some clear advantages: default compatibility with Instagram, server capacity to handle mass influxes, and enthusiasm among users and advertisers for a friendly microblogging platform not owned by Elon Musk. But Threads blew its initial momentum rather quickly, not least thanks to Meta’s insistence on refusing to promote so-called political content—even though the site’s most eager users were, naturally, political organizers situated around the world. Overall engagement with the site plummeted quickly, and issues around blocked news links and erroneously deleted profiles further soured people on the experience.

Threads has made some changes to try to fix this, offering customized feeds for users (following the postelection user surge on the very customizable Bluesky) and, as Zuckerberg noted in last week’s announcement, working to recommend “political content” again. But there’s a much, much deeper issue at hand that might just neuter any chance Threads may have had to take X/Twitter’s place in the social mediasphere—and if that turns out to be the case, it won’t be anyone’s fault but Zuckerberg’s.

Remember, another reason that Threads appealed to ex-Twitterers was that Zuckerberg, at that point in 2023, was in the midst of some rather public spats with Musk, by then Public Enemy No. 1 for liberal users. The two were going to face off in a cage fight after throwing barbs at each other from across their respective social networks. Musk even sent Zuck a cease-and-desist for supposedly stealing Twitter’s trade secrets while building Threads. For a brief moment, following the reputational hits Zuckerberg had taken after Cambridge Analytica and the Facebook Papers, Threads may have earned the grudging embrace of liberals who hated Musk more than they appreciated Zuck.

Which is why it’s especially ironic—or “concerning,” if you will—that Zuckerberg is trying so hard to emulate Musk’s Twitter turnaround in his own goals for Meta.

In last week’s announcement video, and in his conversation with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg evoked Musk in both substance and style. He’s getting rid of fact-checkers in favor of a “Community Notes” feature specifically based on X’s controversial program. He attacked “legacy media,” while supposedly championing “free speech” that allows for more dehumanizing language against transgender Americans. He’s moving certain employees from California to Texas while expressing contempt for the Biden administration’s “censorship” of social media platforms (despite the fact that it was the first Trump administration that policed much online language around the hot-button issues of COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop). He attacked digital regulations in Europe and Latin America and pronounced his desire to change some countries’ laws. Sound familiar?

For all the power and influence Musk may have gained for himself by running X/Twitter, the website itself is nothing less than a mess for those remaining, with users and advertisers fleeing as white nationalism and horrific conspiracy theories spread nonstop. Is it any wonder that advertisers—the primary source of Meta’s massive profits—are already expressing their concerns about Zuck’s redirection? Is it any wonder that Bluesky is retaining user engagement and loyalty in ways that Threads is simply not?

Despite their rapid A.I.-driven enshittification, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are long-extant, essential communication apparatuses for several types of users around the world, and it’s difficult to see Zuck’s changes making severe dents in those platforms as he (presumably) earns more government-backed favors from Trump. (And not to mention as Reels benefits from TikTok’s expulsion.) But Threads? The only reason for anyone to join was that it wasn’t like Elon Musk’s Twitter, as one disaffected user responded to a post from Instagram head Adam Mosseri. By turning Threads into just another form of Twitter, Zuck may have just “neutered” any case for users to join or remain on Threads.

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