Bisola David
Within the first few hours of its introduction, more than 10 million individuals signed up for Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, according to the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday.
Threads is the most serious threat to Elon Musk’s Twitter, which has seen a slew of prospective challengers emerge but has yet to replace one of the world’s largest social media sites despite its difficulties.
At 2300 GMT on Wednesday, the app became live on the Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries and will continue to function without advertisements for the time being. However, because of worries about data privacy, its rollout in Europe has been postponed.
“10 million sign-ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg posted on Thursday from his official Threads account.
Celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Hugh Jackman, as well as media organizations such as The Washington Post and The Economist, weren’t left out as they already have active accounts.
“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” he wrote on Threads.
He added, “Twitter has had the opportunity to do so, but was unable to do so, hopefully, we will.”
Twitter, on the other hand, claims to have over 200 million daily users.
Threads was released as an obvious spin-off of Instagram, which has a built-in audience of more than two billion users, avoiding the problem of beginning from zero for the new platform.
The app, according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, is meant to create “an open and friendly platform for conversations.”
“The best thing you can do if you want that, too, is to be kind,” he advised.
Zuckerberg is widely believed to be exploiting Musk’s unstable ownership of Twitter in order to launch the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to platform for celebrities, businesses, and politicians.