A new platform set to compete with Twitter has been launched this month. Meta’s new social network Threads has been designed for posting short messages. The platform’s operating logic is quite similar to that of Twitter’s or Mastodon’s. Threads is linked to Instagram, which means that the accounts of the same user in both networks are seen as a whole. People who have an account on Instagram will be able to associate both profiles.
Threads works with Instagram, so right now it’s just one account.
Adam Mosseri, CEO Instagram
The limit per message is 500 characters, 200 more than Twitter currently offers for users who are not subscribed to the paid version. Internet users can also reply to, share or quote other people’s posts. Threads also makes it easy to dump posts into Instagram stories. Zuckerberg’s new project allows users to create posts with text, images or video.
Wow, 30 million sign ups as of this morning [6 July]. Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said on his verified Threads account.
Some interoperability and functionality issues were detected by some early adopters. Hours after its launch, users stated that if they wanted to cancel their account on Threads, they also had to delete their Instagram account. A detail that the company itself included in its complementary privacy policy.
Faced with criticism, Meta has begun to look for a way to be able to delete the Threads account independently from Instagram, as pointed out by the director of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. “Threads works with Instagram, so right now it’s just one account,” Mosseri wrote in a post. He assured that engineers at Meta were looking for a way to delete users’ Threads account separately. Mosseri added that for the moment, it is possible to deactivate the Threads account by hiding the profile. Users can choose to set the profile as private and delete individual thread posts.
Threads is already available in more than 100 countries for users with iOS and Android smartphones. Just a few days after its premiere, Threads had already reached 100 million users, according to the website Techcrunch. Instagram has an estimated 2 billion users, which to some analysts could generate momentum for the new platform.
Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg
Elon Musk has posted a series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg. Musk suggested he and Zuckerberg should have “a literal dick-measuring contest”.
In October of last year, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for a total of 39.9 billion euros (USD 44 billion). Shortly after, he ordered a massive number of layoffs and controversies ensued. One of his decisions was to remove the verification tags from a multitude of journalists, media and accounts that have not subscribed to the paid version. He has also closed some profiles, modified the algorithm and limited the number of tweets that can be read per day. Several technology experts had been waiting for Meta’s response to Twitter after the acquisition by Musk. That day has come.
