Meta will launch Threads on Wednesday, a new “microblogging” social network comparable to Twitter, while the platform controlled by Elon Musk is weakened, to the point of asking the question of its survival, even if its rival will remain, for the moment, at the gates of the European Union.
Initially announced Thursday on the application stores, the debut of the new creation of Meta was brought forward to Wednesday 23:00 GMT, according to several specialized sites.
“Instagram’s text chat app.” Here is the description of Threads on the Apple Store, with a presentation that seems close to that of Twitter, according to the visuals.
The launch of Threads comes just four months after the first echoes of the project filtered.
Meta has not communicated formally on the beginnings of this new platform, which comes just days after a new episode at Twitter, whose social network is weakened.
On Saturday, the main shareholder Elon Musk announced the establishment, officially on a provisional basis, of a limit to the number of messages that can be consulted per account and per day, which took users, advertisers and developers the wrong way.
A decision which comes after several other badly received, in particular the transformation into a paying service of the verification of an account or the dismissal of almost all of the content moderation teams.
On Monday, Twitter also announced that the TweetDeck dashboard, which is very popular among active users, would soon only be accessible to verified accounts, which means paying.
“The timing is very good for Meta,” commented Jonathan Taplin, author of two books on the tech giants, including “The End of Reality”, to be published in September. “There are loads of people who have an almost religious resistance to anything related to Elon Musk.”
Meta has chosen to wait before offering Threads to residents of the European Union while it clarifies the implications for the company and its products of the new Digital Markets Regulation (DMA), which came into force in early May, according to a source close to the case.
The DMA aims to impose specific rules on essential Internet companies, in particular Meta, to avoid anti-competitive practices.
The group from Menlo Park (California) nevertheless intends, in the long term, to launch Threads in the European Union, on a date yet to be defined, indicated the source familiar with the matter.
Asked by AFP, Meta did not respond immediately.
The presentation of Threads on the application stores in the United States indicates that will be collected and used for advertising purposes personal data of users related, among other things, to contacts and geolocation.
© 2023 AFP
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