Mark Zuckerberg’s Thread may pose a threat to Elon Musk’s Twitter, as it attracted more than 10 million users in the first few hours of its launch.
On July 6, 2023, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Thread’s parent company Meta, announced this.
The app, which was designed to compete with Twitter, launched on Wednesday at 2300 GMT on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries.
It offers a text-based version of the photo-sharing app Instagram designed for “real-time updates and public conversations”.
“Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads,” Zuckerberg wrote in his first post on the app, accompanied with a fire emoji.
In addition to media organizations like The Washington Post and The Economist, accounts for celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lopez, and Shakira were already active.
Musk and Zuckerberg are well-known rivals who have proposed a cage fight. Zuckerberg also fired a shot in Musk’s direction.
Zuckerberg posted a meme of Spiderman pointing at Spiderman in his first tweet in more than ten years, seemingly alluding to the similarities between Threads and Spiderman.
Instagram, which has a built-in audience of more than two billion users, offered a clear spin-off in the form of Threads, saving the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build “an open and friendly platform for conversations.”
“The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind,” he said.
Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to platform for celebrities, companies and politicians.
“It’s as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive,” strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack.
Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users “to make it as big as Twitter.”
“Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she added.
Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.
