The “cage fight” between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and billionaire Elon Musk may not have materialised yet, but digital combat started in the virtual world with the launch of the Instagram-linked Threads app this week. In the first round, at least, the Meta founder seems to be winning.
Meta, which owns social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, launched Threads as the answer to Musk’s Twitter. More than 30 million signed up within hours of the launch, Zuckerberg “threaded” on the new app.
Touted to be the “Twitter Killer”, Threads was the top free app on Apple App Store in the United Kingdom and United States on its launch day. And that is why it is ThePrint’s Newsmaker of the Week.
Also read: Twitter threatens to sue Meta over new Threads platform, cites intellectual property rights
An edge over Twitter
The Instagram team designed Threads to create a separate space for real-time updates and public conversations. Interestingly, the platform leverages Instagram’s huge user base of over two billion active users, giving it an instant edge over Twitter, which is estimated to have about 400 million active users.
Here’s what users saw in the first 48 hours of signing up on Threads. You can import your login details from your Instagram profile to sign up and follow the same set of friends and pages, unlike Twitter, where one starts from scratch to build their profile. The user interface, though, is quite similar to that of its rival — neat and noisy.
The timing of the app’s launch coincides with a series of sudden changes introduced by Twitter and the platform’s declining revenue, which has been dipping ever since Musk acquired it in October 2022. More recently, Musk announced that Twitter would be putting a limit on the number of tweets that users can read, irking many on the social media platform.
Seeing the high-octane buzz around Threads, Musk saw an opportunity to fuel the Twitter-Meta rivalry a tad more — he replied to a 2018 tweet and wrote: “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.” Twitter has also threatened to sue Meta, alleging that the company hired its former employees who had and continue to have access to the platform’s trade secrets.
Despite Threads being called the biggest rival to Twitter, it’s not a simple copy-paste version of the latter — there are some crucial differences between the two social media platforms.
One, signing up for Threads takes just a few seconds if you already have an Instagram account. And two, it is free for all and allows users to share posts up to 500 characters long and to include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in duration.
Currently live in 100 countries, excluding the European Union (EU), Threads gives users the option to post, repost, and reply to or comment on other posts. Many users who downloaded the app a few hours into the launch were flooded with dozens of follow requests right after they logged in.
Ballooning up
From entertainment to news, Threads is growing larger by the minute. Some of the biggest names have already hopped on the bandwagon, including billionaire Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath. Media houses such as NDTV, BBC, The Indian Express, and India Today, along with corporate brands such as Netflix and Microsoft, have caught up on the trend too. The noted absence of Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX isn’t lost on Threads users.
There are, however, no trending stories or direct messages yet. While you can’t search for specific topics, you can look up user handles.
Users have pointed out some concerns too. To start with, to delete your Threads account, you must get rid of your Instagram account too, which has discouraged some from signing up. And perhaps what’s more disturbing for many is the amount of user data that the sign-up process requires as per App Store — information related to health, financials, and browsing history. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, too, raised concerns regarding data access demanded by Threads, and Musk was only too eager to agree with the former CEO.
But Threads isn’t the first app to have rivalled Twitter. The 2016-launched German software Mastodon, India’s microblogging site Koo that was released in 2020, and Dorsey’s own Bluesky, which he introduced in 2021 — all tried to one-up Twitter, but none succeeded. While Threads has got a very promising start, we will have to wait to see if it can actually beat Twitter.
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(Edited by Humra Laeeq)