NEW YORK — Celebrities, lawmakers, brands and everyday social media users are flocking to Meta’s freshly minted app Threads to connect with their followers, including many Twitter refugees tired of the drama surrounding Elon Musk’s raucous oversight of that platform.
The question is: Will they stay?
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a Threads post Monday that in the five days since its launch, 100 million people have signed up for Threads, which was rolled out as a companion app to Instagram.
Ann Coleman is among them. The 50-year-old, who lives in Baltimore, said she joined Threads after hearing about the platform from a comedian she follows on social media. She said she loves Twitter and has been using it for more than 10 years. She even met her husband on there.
But Coleman, who is politically progressive, has been looking to switch to a new platform because of Musk’s political views and changes he’s made to Twitter, like upending its verification system. She previously joined the decentralized social network Mastodon, but found it a bit confusing to use.
She said she likes Threads but wishes she could easily follow all her Twitter friends there.
Threads gives Instagram users the option to automatically follow the same accounts they do on the photo-sharing app, which makes it easier for active Instagram users to replicate a similar type of engagement on Threads. But others starting from the ground up will have to do more work.
“If I’m going to leave Twitter entirely, I’m going to have to try and find some of these people” from Twitter, Coleman said.
While she said she has her own concerns about Meta — specifically pointing to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, among other things — “it’s not with the depth of concern that I do with Musk.”
For its part, Meta has said it will moderate using Instagram’s content guidelines. In the past few days, the company has been positioning the much-hyped platform as a new digital town square that’s a less toxic version of Twitter, with some executives indicating their aim isn’t to replace Twitter but to offer something more palatable to a vast array of users.
“The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations,” Mosseri said Friday.
Despite the influx of users, Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at the creative agency Mekanism, stressed it’s too early to know how successful Threads will be. He further questions whether the rapid growth of Threads is even a good thing, pointing out some other successful platforms began with a focused approach and expanded more gradually.
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