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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowMeta’s new text-based social network Threads has eclipsed 100 million users in its first five days.
The app is now among the most used social media platforms in the United States, rivaling even TikTok, which had 102.3 million active U.S. users in May, according to data from Insider Intelligence.
In a Monday post on Threads announcing the milestone, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the user base was “mostly organic demand” and Meta has not “turned on many promotions yet.”
But Threads has benefited from its integration with Instagram, Meta’s photo-sharing social network that had an estimated 135 million active U.S. users in May. Users are able to sign up for a Threads account by linking their Instagram account.
Despite not being available in Europe yet because of European Union data privacy regulations, Threads has reached 100 million users faster than any other app. The speed of its growth handily beat artificial intelligence app ChatGPT, which took two months to reach that mark, according to a UBS study.
Threads still trails other social media platforms by a wide margin worldwide. Insider Intelligence’s May estimates peg Facebook with more than 2 billion users, Instagram at 1.4 billion and Twitter at more than 363 million.
The debut of Threads has come while Twitter’s popularity may be declining. Matthew Prince, CEO of network security firm Cloudflare, tweeted a graph showing that Twitter’s traffic ranking has gradually fallen this year.
Twitter did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment Monday.
It has been a rocky several months for Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company, with a flurry of text-based alternatives attracting attention this year. Threads has drawn a particularly strong response from Twitter. Shortly after Threads launched, Twitter threatened legal action against Meta.
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I do not understand why any sensible person would agree to use this platform once they reviewed the terms and conditions. Basically, Meta can access any and all data on your device. This is not good. When are people going to realize this?
Wade, people are blinded by their disdain for Musk/Twitter/et al. Common sense no longer plays a role. They want Twitter to fail, solely because the new owner espoused a belief in free and open 1A support. They will freely give over their privacy to Zuckerberg, they apparently now see as a “good guy”.
You do remember that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, right?
But, no, that wasn’t just it. He bought it without a clear idea how to make money, then he immediately pissed off all the tech influencers when he killed off third party API access in a capricious manner. He seems to forget the Twitter app itself is a flaming piece of garbage.
The idea that you’re going to charge rich and famous people to have a blue checkmark when they were the people providing you free content and improving the value of your platform just speaks to how his shoot first, think later methodology doesn’t work.
He’s managed to make previous ownership AND Zuckerberg look good, which is sure something but likely not what he had in mind. Elon is just flat out of his depth when it comes to running a social network, no different than how Michael Jordan was overmatched when it came to hitting a baseball.
I do Joe, but for some reason, people like you despise him for supporting 1A, not sure why, because I certainly was not surprised that Twitter, or any other Social co did not honor it on their own (and when I say “people like you” I mean closed minded, not political). Why does any of what he did annoy anyone? Twitter was never a valuable asset, hence the “easy” decision by the board to sell. And why do you care if they charge “rich or famous” people for their right to be verified? And if you think that prior ownership looks good, then you have not looked into the so called “twitter files”. But go ahead and disregard Zuckerberg’s treatment of Indigenous people while he pushes them out of ancestral land. Oh, and people are signing up for Threads en masse, not advertisers, so continue to pretend that it is because he pissed off advertisers.