Meta to launch Threads, a rival to Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will finally launch its Threads platform as a rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter, but will it be the “Twitter killer” that media outlets quote people in the tech world as saying?

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News of the release comes as Twitter has been facing challenges over the past few days, limiting users’ ability to see tweets, depending on if they have a verified check or not. Verified users can read 10,000 tweets a day, while unverified users can only read 1,000 tweets in a day. New, unverified users are limited to 500 tweets, The New York Times reported. The limits were put in place over concerns about data scraping, Musk said. He added that “several hundred organizations” were taking Twitter’s data and “it was affecting the real user experience.”

“Threads, an Instagram app” as it is being called, is expected to be released as early as Thursday, The Associated Press reported. As of Tuesday, it is listed as “Coming Soon” and is being called “Instagram’s text-base conversation app.”

It will be linked to Instagram, with users being able to keep their Instagram usernames and follow the same accounts.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, wrote “All your Threads are belong to us,” along with a screenshot of the data that Instagram and Threads will link to users.

The news of Threads comes after Musk made several changes in addition to limiting the number of tweets that can be read, including requiring users to be verified if they use TweetDeck to manage several accounts at the same time, the AP reported.

TweetDeck will be behind a paywall in about 30 days, BBC News reported.

Last year, an unidentified Meta employee wrote an internal post that read “Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” adding, “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER,” the Times reported.

Threads is not the only app that takes inspiration from Twitter. There’s also Mastodon and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platforms, according to BBC News.