On July 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms, launched a new platform dubbed Threads in 100 countries across the globe. The social media network is considered a rival to the micro-blogging platform Twitter.
Speaking against the newly launched platform, Twitter owner and former CEO Elon Musk hauled Threads as a copycat project.
In a Monday Threads post, Zuckerberg wrote that the new project attained 100 million sign-ups over the weekend, only four days after launch. It took Twitter five years to achieve this feat.
Threads function as a sister app for Instagram, as users need to own an Instagram account before creating a Threads page. The platform also has features similar to Twitter’s, such as liking, commenting, reposting, and sharing. It also freely offers some features only available to subscribed Twitter users, like 500 characters per thread, and allows up to five minutes of videos.
However, Threads doesn’t support direct messaging, hashtags, and trending stories – features existing within the Twitter ecosystem.
Stressing the purpose of the Threads platform, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in an interview with The Verge:
“Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space. And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”
Mosseri was likely referring to Musk’s recent actions to bolster Twitter’s revenue by encouraging the subscription to its paid verification option. The former Twitter CEO also limited the number of tweets viewable by users daily.
Still, Mosseri claimed that Threads was not introduced to replace Twitter.
Meanwhile, the popular micro-blogging platform is taking the offensive as the internet buzzes about the similarities and differences between Threads and Twitter.
In a legal letter published last Thursday, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro alleged that Meta employed former Twitter employees to design Threads using insider information from Twitter. Meta, however, denied these allegations. The issue is yet to exacerbate to constitute a lawsuit case.