The thing with very rich and popular people is, they need to do everything with a generous dollop of flair. And everyone must know about it. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter has now unfollowed Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, on Twitter. Give it a moment to sink in. But before Dorsey did that, he made a rather slick move which ensured the world knew about it. As we head towards the end of the year, there isn’t a lot of new stuff happening in the world of tech, and surely, this is the perfect time to drop a bombshell.
What basically happened was that Jack Dorsey first followed a Twitter account called @BigTechAlert. By its own description, @BigTechAlert, “s an automated account that follows the most important executives and people from Big Tech companies and tracks what they do, who they unfollow, and what they fav in Twitter.” Good then. The wheels were in motion. As soon as that was done, he probably counted to 10 and then unfollowed Mark Zuckerberg, whose Twitter handle is @finkd. The @finkd account has 464K followers at the time of writing this. Almost instantaneously, the @BigTechAlert posted a tweet for the Twitterosphere to see – “@jack is no longer following @finkd”. The plan had succeeded. This is fun for almost everyone.
Well, actually, Zuckerberg hasn’t posted anything from this Twitter account since Jan 2012, and we do not know of any other official Twitter presence for the Facebook CEO. But then again, what Dorsey has done is probably more of making a statement, than actually cleaning up his Twitter timeline.
Dorsey and Zuckerberg haven’t been on the same page on a wide range of issues, for quite some time now. Recently, Dorsey didn’t shy away from criticizing Facebook when he announced that Twitter will be suspending all paid political advertisements on the social media site. This came after Facebook said it would not really clamp down on politicians posting on the social platform and that they and political parties are exempt from rules that require fact-checking and frown upon misinformation. “For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want!,” Dorsey had said at the time. This was a direct shot at Facebook.
After that, when Facebook completed the rebranding which involved an all-caps logo, Dorsey took to Twitter to post, “Twitter from TWITTER”.
Yet, it remains unclear what prompted Dorsey to unfollow Zuckerberg’s fairly inactive Twitter account all of a sudden. Is something brewing behind the scenes? Twitter hasn’t official commented. But we surely haven’t heard the last of this saga as the two CEOs have a proper battle of ideologies.
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