Responding to Threads' rapid growth, Twitter's CEO Elon Musk has threatened to sue Meta, accusing the company of launching a "copycat" app. The tension between the two tech giants has been escalating since Musk's acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion last year, leading to significant changes such as workforce reductions and content-viewing limitations.
Zuckerberg, using his Threads account, proudly announced the remarkable milestone of 100 million sign-ups over the weekend, with the majority of users drawn in organically. Notably, this achievement surpasses the early success of Instagram, an independent platform under Zuckerberg's Meta empire, which took a week to reach 100,000 users upon its launch in 2010.
To access Threads, users must have an existing Instagram account, allowing them to seamlessly transfer their Instagram connections to the new platform. Despite Zuckerberg's emphasis on fostering kindness, media watchdog group Media Matters reported that several right-wing figures, including white nationalist Richard Spencer and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, initially signed up for Threads. However, Meta swiftly took down Spencer's account in response.
Industry experts, such as Mike Proulx, Research Director at analysis firm Forrester, have praised Threads' launch as a "case study on what to do right." Proulx acknowledged the platform's meteoric rise in just five days and suggested that it reflects a significant demand for an alternative to Twitter's current state.
Nevertheless, Proulx cautioned that Threads must demonstrate its ability to sustain growth and engage users repeatedly to secure long-term success. Meta, the parent company of Threads, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, has postponed the app's launch in the European Union due to concerns surrounding potential regulatory measures related to personal data usage.
Adding to Twitter's challenges, web services company Cloudflare revealed that website traffic to Twitter has experienced a decline. The managing director of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, shared a graph illustrating a drop in the company's domain server ranking for Twitter in mid-2023. This decline appears to correlate with Musk's implementation of viewing limits on Twitter and the subsequent launch of Threads.
Overall, Threads' remarkable achievement in amassing 100 million sign-ups in such a short timeframe signifies a turning point in the social media landscape, while the rivalry between Meta and Twitter intensifies, with legal threats and disruptive changes shaping the industry's dynamics.