The small galaxy of social networks has a new meteor: Threads. Less than a week after its launch, the application designed by Meta to compete with Twitter already has more than 100 million users, according to the Quiver Quantitative site. Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence application ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, took two months to reach this threshold of active users.
Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, launched this “microblogging” application last Wednesday, the first major threat to the weakened Twitter platform since its takeover last year by billionaire Elon Musk. Among the criticisms of the new face of Twitter are very weak moderation, leaving the field open to hateful content under the pretext of “freedom of expression”, the establishment of a paid subscription system to be more visible and recently the limitation of the number of visible tweets per day.
Elon Musk strikes back
The number of users of Threads is still far from that of Twitter, which unites more than 350 million users. But Meta’s app can rely on synergies with popular image-sharing app Instagram, which has some 2 billion active users. Threads thus allows Instagram users to be authenticated with their existing identifiers to post content on the new platform. It has not yet been launched in the European Union, where this practice appears to be prohibited by the Digital Markets Regulation (DMA), new legislation that will apply to digital giants from March 2024, according to experts.
Elon Musk also decided to fight back, sending through the lawyer for Twitter’s parent company, X Corp, a letter accusing Meta of breaching trade secrets and intellectual property rights. . Facebook’s parent company is notably accused of having recruited “dozens” of former Twitter employees, according to the document published by the Semafor news site. Giving Meta formal notice to cease its actions, X Corp said it was ready to take legal action if it did not. “Competition is not a problem. Cheating is one, ”denounced Elon Musk on Twitter.