Instagram unveils Threads app, a threat to Musk's Twitter

Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram officially unveiled Threads, an app designed as a direct rival to Twitter, launching the most serious threat yet to Elon Musk’s struggling social-media site.

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On Threads, people can post text and links and reply to or repost messages from others. The app will let users port over their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram, Meta’s photo and video-sharing app that counts major brands, celebrities and creators among its more than 2 billion users.

The app garnered more than 10 million sign-ups in its first seven hours, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said on his Threads account. That’s still a far cry, however, from Twitter’s more than 300 million. "There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it," the Meta chief executive officer (CEO) said in an earlier post on Threads. "Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will."

Many of Instagram’s influential users have been asking the company to make a text-based app, according to Connor Hayes, a vice president of product. "Creators were telling us, ‘We want an alternative to what’s out there, and we don’t want to start over and have to build out a following from zero,’" Hayes said in an interview, without mentioning Twitter specifically.