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.
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.
“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a 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.
Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, have a long – and successful – history of copying products from upstart internet competitors. The company’s Reels feature was a knockoff of TikTok’s viral video app, and its Stories disappearing posts followed the rise of Snap Inc.’s Snapchat. Meta’s apps in the past have competed indirectly for user attention with Twitter by courting news publishers, politicians and other high-profile people to favor posting on one versus the other. The arrival of Threads marks the first time Meta is releasing a Twitter lookalike.