CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — A new social media platform that is said to rival Twitter has now launched around a half-day early.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, surprise-launched Threads Wednesday evening.
“Well, this is pretty much Facebook’s M.O.,” said communications strategist Roshanda Pratt. “This is how Meta rolls. So either you’re going to sell them the idea or they’re going to take your idea and make it better.”
Threads, a text-based conversation app has officially launched. It advertises its capability to capitalize on Instagram’s 2 billion users.
“That connection to the Instagram social graph is going to be kind of its key selling point,” said social media consultant Matt Navarra. “That will be a differentiator from other options, which is why I think many of the other rival platforms have not gotten the same level of traction as I think this may well get.”
Those who searched “thread” or “threads” on Instagram got early access to the new social media platform Wednesday night. Users can keep their same Instagram handles and follow the same profiles as they do on Instagram, essentially copying and pasting their profile from one platform to another.
“People are just tired of fighting for the attention of these apps,” Pratt said. “Well, we’re giving you space. We share out content, we’re sharing our thoughts, and people want to be honored and respected while they’re in their social media spaces.”
Twitter users have grown frustrated with recent changes from Elon Musk to monetize features such as TweetDeck while limiting the number of tweets a user can see in a single day.
“It’s hard to tell whether the upset and discontent is strong enough to make a mass exodus or whether it will be somewhat of a slow erosion of Twitter,” said Navarra.
“This was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the fact that many people were starting to leave Twitter. They needed an alternative, and here’s Mark Zuckerberg saying, ‘Come here. I’ll take you in.’” Pratt said.
Meta provides an extensive list of the data it can collect from you on the app, which includes financial information, purchases, sensitive information, and browsing history. While “Threads” was trending on Twitter Wednesday night, Elon Musk had yet to tweet a response to the launch.
