Meta Launches Threads App Taking Aim at Twitter and Free Speech

Meta Platforms has launched a direct challenge to Twitter with its all new Threads App, gaining millions of users in hours. Many of those who joined the new Meta’s Threads app were Twitter users who quit after Elon Musk bought the platform and restored free speech.

Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, as well as far left politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were among the first to join the new platform. “May this platform have good vibes, a strong community, excellent humour, and less harassment,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a Facebook post.

“Let’s get started. “Welcome to Threads,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote beside a fire emoji in his first post on the app. He said that the Threads App had 10 million sign-ups in seven hours.

He also took to Twitter, posting a well-known meme of Spiderman battling Spiderman – a satirical dig at Musk and the rivalry between the two services.

According to analysts, Threads’ ties to Instagram may provide it with a built-in user base and advertising equipment. This might syphon ad revenue away from Twitter at a time when the company’s new CEO is attempting to turn things around.

Threads App has many Twitter similarities

While Threads is a standalone app, users can log in with their Instagram credentials and follow the same profiles, possibly making it an easy addition to Instagram’s more than 2 billion monthly active users’ existing habits.

The Threads App, like Twitter, includes brief text posts that users can like, re-post, and reply to, but it does not support direct messaging. According to a Meta blog article, posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photographs, and videos up to five minutes long.

According to the blog post, it is available in over 100 countries on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

Meta stock closed up 3% on Wednesday, outperforming advances by rival tech businesses.

Threads App’ arrival comes after months of squabbles between Zuckerberg and Musk, including threats to fight in a real-life mixed martial arts cage competition in Las Vegas. Meta is striking at a moment when Twitter is clearly on the defensive.

Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter last October, but its valuation has since dropped due to significant employee cutbacks and content moderation scandals that have alienated both users and advertisers. Its most recent action was to limit the quantity of tweets users could read every day.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the difficulties that large public social media venues provide. “I believe there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion or more users.” Twitter has had the opportunity to do so, but has failed to do so. “Hopefully so,” he wrote.

Several allusions to privacy concerns were included in the Instagram integration. Instagram users who sign up for Threads will instantly have a badge added to their profile, although they can choose to hide it. They are also given the option of selecting various privacy settings for each app.

Failing Twitter competitors

Billboard, HBO, NPR, and Netflix all had accounts set up within minutes of the start. According to Reuters, the app did not appear to display any advertisements.

To expand Threads, Meta has been reaching out to social media influencers and urging them to post at least twice a day, according to Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer marketing firm Influential.

The app may benefit from other would-be Twitter competitors’ failure to capitalise on the service’s setbacks. While a number of emerging competitors, including Mastodon, Post, Truth Social, and T2, have attempted to entice Twitter users away, they have remained relatively tiny thus far.

Bluesky Social, a new service sponsored by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, opened its invite-only beta in February and had people clamoring for access codes at the time. According to its website, it had 50,000 users as of April. Dorsey has invested in a platform named Nostr.

However, Meta has previously failed to create separate copycat apps, most notably its Lasso app, which was aimed at competing with TikTok, a short video rival.

Later, the business integrated a short video tool called Reels right into Instagram, and it just shut down its experimental app unit.

In response to a user who forecast Twitter’s downfall barely an hour after Threads launched, Zuckerberg advised patience. “We’re only in the first round right now,” he explained.

Twitter Threatens to Sue Over Plagiarism

Meanwhile, Twitter’s lawyer sent a letter to Facebook parent Meta, accusing the corporation of “systematic” and “unlawful misappropriation” of trade secrets in the aftermath of the debut of its Threads service.

According to the letter from longtime Elon Musk attorney Alex Spiro, Meta’s new Twitter clone was constructed by former Twitter employees who were “deliberately assigned” to create a “copycat” programme.

Spiro stated that Meta is “expressly prohibited” from crawling or scraping Twitter’s follower data, but provided no evidence that Meta had done so. Musk earlier claimed that large-scale scraping of Twitter user data occurred, though he, too, failed to provide concrete examples.

While Elon Musk has kept mute on the Threads debut, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has taken the opportunity to criticise the new site. Yaccarino stressed in a tweet that while Twitter can be imitated, the lively Twitter community can never be replicated.

Meta’s Threads app is just one of numerous Twitter competitors that have gained traction since Elon Musk took over the company last year. His policies and strategies have been extensively criticised as capitalistic.