Threads, the new social media platform from Facebook parent company Meta, hit 10 million users in the UK and US in its first seven hours of launch. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced this on Thursday morning, according to international news agencies. It is a striking first crop, especially since celebrities such as Gordon Ramsay, Shakira and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have already moved to the platform, as well as renowned news organizations The Washington PostReuters and The Economists. Also the VVD now has a Threads accountalthough it is not clear how the party created the account on the platform that is not yet available in EU countries.
Threads is similar in everything – how it looks, what you can do with it and how it works – to Twitter. The biggest usage change is that a message can be 500 characters on Threads, on Twitter it’s 280. The similarities are no coincidence; the app is also called the ‘Twitter killer’. Zuckerberg explicitly sees the new platform as a new, better version of Twitter, which is vulnerable under the frenetic leadership of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk. If a quarter of Instagram users also create a Threads account, Threads will have already overtaken Twitter. But the company is far from there: Musk’s app has 368 million monthly active users.
Read also Meta’s Zuckerberg goes into slugfest with Twitter
Privacy nightmare
Threads is already garnering criticism for its terms of use. To create an account on the app you must have an Instagram profile to connect to. From there, users can also directly import their contact list. The integration between Threads and Instagram is useful for some, but when you try to delete a Threads account, the connected Instagram profile will also be deleted.
In addition, after launch, Threads appears to be a ‘privacy nightmare’, according to tech platform Tech Crunch. The app collects a laundry list of privacy-sensitive data from users, including information about your contacts, purchases, location, health and fitness, financial information, search history and which messages you have viewed in the app. With Facebook’s robust data collection and the integrated Threads and Instagram, Meta has a huge amount of data at its disposal, with the potential to grow. Meta sells that user data on to companies, which gratefully use the insights hidden in the data sets for, for example, offering targeted advertisements. Meta has decided not to release the app in the European Union yet; the company first wants more clarity about the privacy regulations of the EU.
Dated meme
Zuckerberg himself returned to Twitter after eleven years – in an attempt at internet humor – post a Spiderman meme derisively demonstrating that Threads is very similar to Twitter.
Zuckerberg isn’t the first to smell blood when Musk took control of Twitter. Decentralized platform Mastodon also entered the market with the aim of breaking Twitter’s hold on the market. The founder of Mastodon, Eugen Roche, is raving about Threads, because it promises to allow users to interact with other platforms: “We have been advocating for enabling cross-platform interaction for years. The biggest hurdle for switching social media is the fact that you leave everyone you know behind.” According to Roche, the fact that more apps are in contact with each other “forces platforms to provide better, less exploitative services.”
Musk himself reacts cynically on the launch of Threads: “It’s endlessly more attractive to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than to immerse yourself in the fake happiness of the pain-hiding Instagram.”