Within seven hours
Threads already has ten million users
07/06/2023 11:21 am
The new Threads app is Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration of war against Twitter. His ambitious goal: one billion users. The start makes him confident. In this country, however, interested parties must be patient.
The new Twitter copy of the Facebook group Meta has more than ten million users after a short time. The Threads app hit the mark seven hours after launch, wrote Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. Four hours after the start, he had already welcomed more than five million new users. However, the launch in Europe has been delayed due to the pending approval from Brussels.
Threads is Twitter’s biggest challenger to date. A number of potential competitors have positioned themselves, especially since the takeover of the platform by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk. So far, however, none has been able to establish itself as a real alternative.
Zuckerberg himself makes no secret of the competition with Twitter and Musk. On the competing platform, where he had not previously spoken publicly for more than ten years, he has now published an image that alludes to the similarity in how Twitter and his new app work.
Shakira and Jennifer Lopez are already there
“It will take time, but I think there should be a public conversation app used by over a billion people,” he wrote on Threads afterwards. “Twitter had the opportunity to do this but didn’t make it. Hopefully we can.” Twitter has historically numbered over 200 million daily active users.
A big plus: Threads isn’t starting from scratch, as the app was officially launched as a fork of Instagram, another Meta subsidiary. If you already have an Instagram account, you can log into Threads directly with the appropriate access data and transfer your contacts. Instagram has over two billion users.
Meta hopes to make Threads the new favorite communication channel for celebrities, politicians, and corporations, and to capitalize on the chaos Musk has unleashed on Twitter. Stars like Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and Hugh Jackman were quick to find on Threads. Important media companies such as the “Washington Post” and the magazine “The Economist” also opened official accounts. Threads should run without ads for the time being.
Data protection concerns in Europe
After the Twitter takeover last year, Musk fired most of the staff and initiated far-reaching and often erratic changes. Last weekend he caused a stir with his decision to limit the number of tweets that non-paying Twitter users can read each day. In addition, tweets are now no longer visible to Internet users who are not logged into Twitter.
Meta announced in mid-March that it was working on a Twitter-like network. “We are considering a decentralized, independent social network that enables the exchange of written messages in real time,” the group said at the time. In contrast to most online platforms, Threads is to be designed in the future in such a way that it is interoperable with other networks.
However, there is also a lot of criticism of the meta group, especially in Europe, which could slow down the development of threads. The main focus is on the handling of personal data. Just this week, the European Court of Justice gave the Federal Cartel Office the green light to sue Meta for merging user data from its Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp services. According to information from insider circles, the pending start of threads in Europe is related to this: Meta therefore first wants to make sure that linking threads to Instagram does not break any EU law.