Meta’s new social network, Threads, created to compete with Twitter, had 30 million users last Thursday (06), less than a day after it launched, said group president and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Threads gains 30 million users in one day – Photo: Meta / Reproduction / ND

Topics are growing

Launched at 23:00 last Wednesday (5) in 100 countries and running ad-free, the app is still the biggest threat to Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, weakened for several reasons.

“Wow, 30 million accounts,” Zuckerberg said this Thursday.

“I would say that we are facing something exceptional, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us to create an application,” he adds.

He previously challenged Musk: “It will take some time, but I believe there should be a public platform to communicate with more than 1 billion people. Twitter had the opportunity to do this, but it didn’t happen. I hope we make it.”

In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a meme in which “Spider-Man” points to another Spider-Man, clearly hinting at the similarities between the two social networks.

“We hope Threads can become an open and welcoming discussion platform,” wrote Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.

“If you want it too, it’s better to be kind.”

Musk’s reaction to the launch of Threads was accompanied by the threat of legal action. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg published by news site Semafor, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro accuses the company of “misappropriating Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

The letter accused the Meta of hiring dozens of former Musk employees who “had and still have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly sensitive information.”

Last Thursday evening, Musk retweeted an image comparing the Threads logo to a parasitic worm. “In a figurative sense, too,” he added.

In another post hinting at a possible Twitter lawsuit against Meta, the mogul wrote: “Competition is good, scams are not.”

Meta spokesman Andy Stone was blunt in his response to Threads: “None of the Threads engineers are ex-Twitter employees, they just don’t exist,” he said.

Possible failure

Meta has not made an official announcement about the launch of the platform, which comes days after a new Twitter-related controversy.

Last Saturday, Musk, the main shareholder of the blue birds network, announced a limit on the number of views available to users, which did not please users, developers and advertisers.

The decision is part of a series of changes that the mogul has introduced to the platform that have been poorly received, such as new rules for subscription-verified profiles and the layoff of almost all content moderation staff.

Additionally, on Monday, Twitter announced that the TweetDeck extension, which is very popular with more frequent users and businesses, will only be available as part of a subscription plan.

For now, Meta has decided not to offer Threads to residents of the European Union until there are implications for the company and its products based on the new Digital Markets Regulation (DMA) that went into effect in early May, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The DMA is seeking to impose certain rules on key Internet companies, especially Meta, to prevent anti-competitive practices.

takeoff platform

Meta has been open about its rapid growth strategy for the newly launched app, as it decided from the start to present it as an offshoot of Instagram, which is “the most successful product of the Meta family,” said Pinar Yıldırım. professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“They couldn’t link the new product to Facebook because no one likes the name anymore.”

With over 2 billion active users, Instagram gives Threads the take-off platform dreamed of by smaller Twitter rivals like Mastodon and Bluesky, or networks favored by ultra-conservatives like Truth Social, Speak, Gettr and Gab. Thus, Threads allows Instagram users for direct authentication if they already have a profile to post content on the new platform.

“The equation is simple: if an Instagram user with a significant following likes [Kim] kardashian, [Justin] bieber or [Lionel] Messi is starting to post regularly on Threads, the new platform could grow rapidly and I believe ad budgets will follow suit in the short term,” wrote Substack analyst Brian Wiser.

Already this Thursday, Threads had active accounts from celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Hugh Jackman and Jack Black, as well as vehicles like The Washington Post and The Economist.