Meta’s Zuckerberg says X is too ‘polarized’ to reach full potential

Mark Zuckerberg said fellow social media magnate Elon Musk’s “polarizing” management and posting style are the main reasons his platform X is not reaching its full potential.

In a conversation with The Verge this week, Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook’s parent company, lamented the current position of X, long known as Twitter, in the social media landscape. 

“I think it’s still not clear exactly what trajectory it’s on,” he said. “But I do think [Mr. Musk] has been pretty polarizing, so I think that the chance that it sort of reaches the full potential on the trajectory that it’s on is… I don’t know.”

Despite his criticisms, Mr. Zuckerberg did say that he saw some promise in Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter last year, praising his fellow multi-billionaire as a “change agent.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments come as Mr. Musk struggles to hold on to users, advertisers, activists and other organizations following deep personnel cuts and new usage rules he instituted at X. 

Since taking over the platform late last year, Mr. Musk has radically changed the site. In an effort to bolster free expression on the site, Mr. Musk has loosened content moderation on X and invited controversial users back. This, some argue, has led to an uptick in hate speech and offensive posts on the platform. 

But the move to a more relaxed content moderation policy alienated advertisers who didn’t want their posts near controversial content. Advertisers left in droves, causing a severe downturn in X’s revenue. 

Mr. Zuckerberg, for his part, has attempted to capitalize on the questions surrounding X by launching a similar, Meta-run version of the site called Threads. The platform is linked through Meta’s Instagram and received over 100 million sign-ups in its first few days. However, the active daily user base is rapidly declining and is still well below X’s user base.