5 million Threads sign-ups in first four hours—Zuckerberg • PhilSTAR Life

Five million users have signed up to Threads, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday, July 6 (Philippine time)—just hours after the app's launch.

Accounts are already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Hugh Jackman, as well as media outlets including The Washington Post, Reuters, and The Economist on Meta's newly launched text-based social media platform and rival to Elon Musk-owned Twitter.

"Let's do this. Welcome to Threads," wrote Meta chief executive and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in his first post on the new platform, which will run with no ads for now.

He offered a shot across the bow at Musk—the pair are known to be bitter rivals, and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.

"It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully, we will," Zuckerberg said.

Shortly thereafter, he wrote: "Just passed 5 million sign-ups in the first four hours..."

'Be kind'

Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.

Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk's chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to communication channel for celebrities, companies, and politicians.

"It's as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive," strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack.

Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users "to make it as big as Twitter."

"Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening," she added.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build "an open and friendly platform for conversations."

"The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind," he said.

Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.

Musk hired advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to steady the ship, but she has not been spared his whimsy.

The Tesla tycoon said last week that he was limiting access to Twitter to ward off AI companies from "scraping" the site to train their technology.

Musk then angered Twitter's most devoted aficionados by declaring that access to its TweetDeck product—which allows users to view a fast flow of tweets at once—would be for paying customers only. (with reports from Alex Pigman and Thomas Urbain - AFP)

TAGS: Twitter Social media mark zuckerberg Elon Musk threads