With Threads signups surging past 30 million, Zuckerberg notches a win

It’s hard to imagine a better launch for a new social media network than Meta’s Threads app, which by Thursday had attracted more than 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours.

Not only did the platform’s user base grow quickly, but it also attracted social media stars and celebrities with the power to generate the kind of buzz that most start-ups could only dream of.

That is just the kind of good news Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has been looking for.

For months, Zuckerberg has sought to shore up the company’s core digital ads business by laying off thousands of workers and mimicking the viral popularity of TikTok by elevating content on its social networks from creators over posts from friends and family.

Now, with Threads, Meta is seizing on Elon Musk’s rocky tenure overseeing Twitter and the staying power of text-based social media networking to expand its digital footprint in a big way.

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

Meta is betting that the large user base and cultural cachet of Instagram will give Threads an edge that other Twitter alternatives, starting from zero, have lacked.

But experts say the company still faces challenges to avoid Myspace-level obscurity for Threads, including developing features that social media power users have grown accustomed to and sustaining a steady flow of content that will keep everyday people engaged.

“To me, the real question beyond the launch is: Can you keep users there?” said Mark Shmulik, who covers U.S. internet companies for the firm Bernstein. “How quickly can you roll out the features users want?”

So far, the app functions similarly to Twitter. So similarly that Twitter attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta on Thursday accusing the company of poaching Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app in a matter of months.

Users share posts – or “threads” – with inspirational memes, late-night thoughts and sarcastic quips. Like Twitter, Threads is focused on text posts, limiting each to 500 characters (Twitter’s limit is 280).

Users can also tag one another using the @ symbol, as well as reply to and “repost” a thread.

But unlike Twitter, Threads does not have capabilities that many social media users are used to, such as the ability to send direct messages, to search for content or use hashtags to capitalize on viral trends.

Meta executives over the past day have hinted that such changes may be on the way.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on the app that the company plans to include a search function and flesh out a website version of Threads.

“Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” Zuckerberg said in a post on the app.

Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst for the industry analytics firm Insider Intelligence, said the simplicity of Threads’ layout might be welcomed by Twitter users who have struggled to adjust to the laundry list of changes happening on Musk’s platform.

“For now, the simplicity and back-to-basics nature of Threads is what’s attracting users to it,” Enberg said. “I think it is smart to take it slowly in rolling out new features.”

Within hours of the Threads launch, Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Jack Black, Kylie Minogue, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gwen Stefani, Noah Beck and Shakira were among the artists and media personalities to join. Republican presidential hopeful Mike Pence, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has criticized Twitter under Musk’s leadership, were among the first politicians to sign up.

“May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humor and less harassment,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

One key question is whether Threads users will end up sharing the same kind of snarky humor, aggressive politicking and sharp commentary about news and world events that is often popular on Twitter, Enberg said.

“One of the challenges, of course, is figuring out exactly what this app is going to be. I think it’s hard to imagine that it is going to be an exact replica of Twitter,” she said. “And I don’t think it necessarily needs to be.”

The sign-up figures shared by Zuckerberg would mean Threads was attracting more than 1 million new users per hour, although The Washington Post could not immediately authenticate how many of the sign-ups were by real people. That dwarfs other would-be rivals to Musk’s platform, such as Mastodon and Bluesky, whose user counts have yet to grow beyond single-digit millions.

“I don’t know that the launch could have gone any better. The number of sign-ups is outrageous by any kind of standard metric,” Shmulik said.

“I kind of joke like ChatGPT was going around and touting that they got to a million users in five days. Meta did it in like hours.”

An early advantage for Threads is the app’s links to Instagram, giving it an easy-to-reach, built-in potential user base.

Threads users can log in with one click using their Instagram credentials and are immediately given the option to carry over their username and follow some or all of the same accounts.

Meta’s Threads launch also coincides with the tail end of a rocky week for Twitter.

Over the weekend, Musk announced that the platform would temporarily limit the number of tweets that users could read per day and unveiled a “temporary emergency measure” preventing users who aren’t logged in from viewing tweets on the platform’s web browser.

He said the moves were meant to prevent third-party programs from combing the platform for data.

While Meta has yet to introduce advertising to Threads, the company will also eventually have a leg up over Twitter in recruiting and retaining marketers.

Twitter has historically struggled to monetize its viral popularity, in part because the company failed to take advantage of the boom in targeted advertising, which Meta and Google specialized in.

Instead, Twitter often attracted big brands that wanted to push broad marketing campaigns.

Musk’s efforts to weaken Twitter’s content moderation practices also has turned off advertisers nervous about whether their companies’ brands are safe on the platform.

In March, an analysis by The Post found that Twitter’s algorithms were amplifying hateful and extremist content to users on their “For You” pages, despite Musk’s pledge not to boost hate speech.

Meta has said it would apply the same content guidelines to Threads as those it enforces on Instagram, where hate speech, harassment and content that degrades or shames private individuals is prohibited.

Users who are prohibited from having accounts on Instagram are also barred from creating profiles on Threads.

Still, Meta is likely to face scrutiny from regulators and activists if misinformation, conspiracies and privacy problems proliferate on Threads.

While those groups might criticize the company for not taking down enough problematic content, some right-wing influencers were already complaining about the company’s content moderation practices.

Meta said Threads was rolled out in more than 100 countries, but not in the European Union, where Meta was recently fined $1.3 billion for breaching data privacy rules.

The bloc’s recent Digital Markets Act also calls into question some of the firm’s data-sharing practices.

Some critics, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who now helps run another Twitter alternative, Bluesky, pointed to the lengthy list of personal data to which Threads users are asked to grant Instagram access.

The information includes health and fitness data, search history, contacts and browsing history, according to its profile on Apple’s App Store.

The companies are competing during economically fraught times for social media platforms, whose businesses are heavily reliant on digital advertising.

Sluggish growth in the e-commerce market, new privacy rules from Apple and rising inflation have hurt companies that offer marketing services.

Internet companies such as Meta, Snap, Google and Twitter have together laid off tens of thousands of workers over the past year. Meta alone cut more than 20,000 jobs, creating a morale crisis among the company’s workforce.

Since then, though, the fortunes of many of the tech companies have started to rebound.

Meta’s stock, in particular, has risen by more than 126% in six months. In April, the company notched its first quarterly revenue increase in nearly a year.

While their companies wage fierce battles over the future of text-based social media apps, Musk and Zuckerberg are also exchanging lighthearted barbs on social media.

The two recently appeared to agree to participate in a Jujitsu fight.

And throughout the launch of Threads, the two have touted their own platforms and subtly and not-so subtly taken aim at each other’s businesses.

Meta has billed Threads as a positive space where users can “tune out” the noise. “We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place,” Zuckerberg said late Wednesday.

Over at Twitter, Musk attacked Instagram for promoting what he called fake positivity, appearing to lean into the contrast.

“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he wrote on Twitter late Wednesday.