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  • Zuckerberg claims tens of millions of Threads signups within days of launch

    Zuckerberg claims tens of millions of Threads signups within days of launch

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    More than 70 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within the first two days of its launch, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Friday.

    The number is likely to grow quickly as more Instagram users and social media fans open accounts on Threads. The app is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of social media’s most iconic companies, despite its epic struggles.

    “70 million sign ups on Threads as of this morning. Way beyond our expectations.” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads at noon Eastern time on Friday.

    The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday and won’t have ads for now. 

    Threads had been slated for release at 10 a.m. Eastern Time Thursday but the company on Wednesday pushed forward its release to that evening.

    threads-homepage.jpg
    The Threads homepage as it launched on July 5, 2023.

    threads.net


    Celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist, as well as CBS News, the parent of CBS MoneyWatch, joined the service, with many racking up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users. Zuckerberg had 2.2 million followers as of Friday afternoon.

    Zuckerberg’s first Threads posts

    Zuckerberg spent the first few hours of the platform’s launch replying to new users.

    “One thing that’s up is the number of world champion MMA fighters on Threads, especially now that you’re here!” he wrote in a reply to American MMA fighter Jon Jones.

    “Round one of this thing is getting off to a good start,” he said in another.

    Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk — they’re known to be bitter rivals and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.

    In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarity of the two platforms.

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

    Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.

    Twitter killer?

    In the days leading up to Threads’ release, some people on social media referred to it as a “Twitter killer” because of the expectation that some users of the rival platform will jump ship in favor of the new app. Some Twitter users have expressed frustration with recent changes instituted by Musk.

    Twitter has also seen a spike in hate speech since Musk bought the platform last year.

    Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.

    Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to communication channel for celebrities, companies and politicians.

    Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
    Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Elon Musk. 

    MANDEL NGAN,ALAIN JOCARD / AFP via Getty Images


    “It’s as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive,” strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack.

    Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users “to make it as big as Twitter.”

    “Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she added. 

    Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build “an open and friendly platform for conversations.” 

    “The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind,” he said.

    Twitter changes under Musk  

    Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum, with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.

    Musk hired advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to steady the ship, but she has not been spared his whimsy.

    The Tesla tycoon said last week that he was limiting access to Twitter to ward off AI companies from “scraping” the site to train their technology. Musk then angered Twitter’s most devoted aficionados by declaring that access to its TweetDeck product — which enables users to view multiple accounts and Twitter lists at once — would be for paying customers only.

    Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in Europe, and despite Instagram’s massive user base, they could slow the site’s development. 

    The company is criticized mainly for its handling of personal data — the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits every quarter.

    Mosseri said he regretted that the EU launch was delayed, but if Meta had waited for regulatory clarity from Brussels, Threads would remain “many, many, many, months away.”

    “I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important,” he added to Platformer, a tech news site.

    Data issues

    According to a source close to the matter, Meta was wary of a new law called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which sets strict rules for the world’s “gatekeeper” internet companies.

    One rule restricts platforms from transferring personal data between products, as would potentially be the case between Threads and Instagram.

    Meta was called out for doing just that after it bought the messaging app WhatsApp, and European regulators will be on high alert to ensure that the company doesn’t do so illegally with Threads. 

    Globally, the Threads hashtag on Twitter has garnered over a million tweets, with many users jokingly suggesting users would be returning to Twitter. 

    “10 mins into threads app. Me coming back to Twitter,” one user wrote, sharing a video of a man sprinting. 

    Another shared an image of Homer Simpson running back and forth between the Twitter and Threads logos. 

    By midday local time Thursday, Threads was the top trending topic on Japan Twitter, but many users expressed concerns over data privacy. 

    “Threads is run by Meta, isn’t it? It will definitely leak your real name or the game you are playing, or put you in the list of your workplace company friends,” wrote one user. 

    Another said: “Meta loves to collect private information and I don’t trust the way it treats private information. I also have the impression that this is a company hated by EU, so I’m reluctant.” 

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  • Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, gains 10 million users in under 24 hours, Zuckerberg says

    Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, gains 10 million users in under 24 hours, Zuckerberg says

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    Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, gains 10 million users in under 24 hours, Zuckerberg says – CBS News


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    Threads, the new social media platform owned by Meta, has amassed more than 10 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours, according to Mark Zuckerberg. Ryan Heath, global tech correspondent for Axios, has more on the new challenger to Twitter.

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  • Zuckerberg claims millions of Threads signups within hours of launch

    Zuckerberg claims millions of Threads signups within hours of launch

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    More than 10 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.

    The number is likely to grow quickly as more Instagram users and social media fans open accounts on Threads, with NBC News reporting that 23 million had signed up by Thursday morning. It cited the number of Threads badges on Instagram users’ accounts, which indicates they have opened a Threads account.

    Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of social media’s most iconic companies, despite its epic struggles.

    The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 7:00 p.m. EDT on Wednesday and won’t have ads for now.

    Threads had been slated for release at 10 a.m. EDT Thursday but the company on Wednesday pushed forward its countdown clock.

    threads-homepage.jpg
    The Threads homepage as it launched on July 5, 2023.

    threads.net


    “10 million sign ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account Thursday.

    Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist, as well as CBS News, the parent of CBS MoneyWatch.

    Zuckerberg’s first Threads posts

    Zuckerberg spent the first few hours of the platform’s launch replying to new users.

    “One thing that’s up is the number of world champion MMA fighters on Threads, especially now that you’re here!” he wrote in a reply to American MMA fighter Jon Jones.

    “Round one of this thing is getting off to a good start,” he said in another.

    Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk — they’re are known to be bitter rivals and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.

    In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarity of the two platforms.

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

    Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.

    Twitter killer?

    In the days leading up to Threads’ release, some people on social media referred to it as a “Twitter killer” because of the expectation that some users of the rival platform will jump ship in favor of the new app. Some Twitter users have expressed frustration with recent changes instituted by Musk.

    Twitter has also seen a spike in hate speech since Musk bought the platform last year.

    Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.

    Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to communication channel for celebrities, companies and politicians.

    COMBO-US-TECHNOLOGY-META-TWITTER
    Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg 

    MANDEL NGAN,ALAIN JOCARD / AFP via Getty Images


    “It’s as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive,” strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack.

    Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users “to make it as big as Twitter.”

    “Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she added.

    Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build “an open and friendly platform for conversations.”

    “The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind,” he said.

    Twitter changes under Musk  

    Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum, with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.

    Musk hired advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to steady the ship, but she has not been spared his whimsy.

    The Tesla tycoon said last week that he was limiting access to Twitter to ward off AI companies from “scraping” the site to train their technology.

    Musk then angered Twitter’s most devoted aficionados by declaring that access to its TweetDeck product — which enables users to view a fast flow of tweets at once — would be for paying customers only.

    Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in Europe, and despite Instagram’s massive user base, they could slow the site’s development.

    The company is criticized mainly for its handling of personal data — the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits every quarter.

    Mosseri said he regretted that the EU launch was delayed, but if Meta had waited for regulatory clarity from Brussels, Threads would remain “many, many, many, months away.”

    “I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important,” he added to Platformer, a tech news site.

    Data issues

    According to a source close to the matter, Meta was wary of a new law called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which sets strict rules for the world’s “gatekeeper” internet companies.

    One rule restricts platforms from transferring personal data between products, as would potentially be the case between Threads and Instagram.

    Meta was called out for doing just that after it bought the messaging app WhatsApp, and European regulators will be on high alert to ensure that the company doesn’t do so illegally with Threads.

    Globally, the Threads hashtag on Twitter has garnered over a million tweets, with many users jokingly suggesting users would be returning to Twitter.

    “10 mins into threads app. Me coming back to Twitter,” one user wrote, sharing a video of a man sprinting.

    Another shared an image of Homer Simpson running back and forth between the Twitter and Threads logos.

    By midday local time Thursday, Threads was the top trending topic on Japan Twitter, but many users expressed concerns over data privacy.

    “Threads is run by Meta, isn’t it? It will definitely leak your real name or the game you are playing, or put you in the list of your workplace company friends,” wrote one user.

    Another said: “Meta loves to collect private information and I don’t trust the way it treats private information. I also have the impression that this is a company hated by EU, so I’m reluctant.” 

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  • Zuckerberg claims more than 10 million Threads signups within hours of launch

    Zuckerberg claims more than 10 million Threads signups within hours of launch

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    More than 10 million people have signed up to Threads, Meta’s rival to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.

    Threads is the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of social media’s most iconic companies, despite its epic struggles.

    The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 7:00 p.m. EDT on Wednesday and won’t have ads for now.

    Threads had been slated for release at 10 a.m. EDT Thursday but the company on Wednesday pushed forward its countdown clock.

    threads-homepage.jpg
    The Threads homepage as it launched on July 5, 2023.

    threads.net


    “10 million sign ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account Thursday.

    Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Hugh Jackman as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.

    Zuckerberg spent the first few hours of the platform’s launch replying to new users.

    “One thing that’s up is the number of world champion MMA fighters on Threads, especially now that you’re here!” he wrote in a reply to American MMA fighter Jon Jones.

    “Round one of this thing is getting off to a good start,” he said in another.

    Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk — they’re are known to be bitter rivals and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.

    In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in an apparent reference to the similarity of the two platforms.

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

    Twitter has said it has more than 200 million daily users.

    In the days leading up to Threads’ release, some people on social media referred to it as a “Twitter killer” because of the expectation that some users of the rival platform will jump ship in favor of the new app. Some Twitter users have expressed frustration with recent changes instituted by Musk.

    Twitter has also seen a spike in hate speech since Musk bought the platform last year.

    Threads was introduced as a clear spin-off of Instagram, which offers a built-in audience of more than two billion users, thereby sparing the new platform the challenge of starting from scratch.

    Zuckerberg is widely understood to be taking advantage of Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter to push out the new product, which Meta hopes will become the go-to communication channel for celebrities, companies and politicians.

    “It’s as simple as that: if an Instagram user with a large number of followers such as Kardashian or a Bieber or a Messi begins posting on Threads regularly, a new platform could quickly thrive,” strategic financial analyst Brian Wieser said on Substack.

    Analyst Jasmine Engberg from Insider Intelligence said Threads only needs one out of four Instagram monthly users “to make it as big as Twitter.”

    “Twitter users are desperate for an alternative, and Musk has given Zuckerberg an opening,” she added.

    Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told users that Threads was intended to build “an open and friendly platform for conversations.”

    “The best thing you can do if you want that too is be kind,” he said.

    Under Musk, Twitter has seen content moderation reduced to a minimum, with glitches and rash decisions scaring away celebrities and major advertisers.

    Musk hired advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to steady the ship, but she has not been spared his whimsy.

    The Tesla tycoon said last week that he was limiting access to Twitter to ward off AI companies from “scraping” the site to train their technology.

    Musk then angered Twitter’s most devoted aficionados by declaring that access to its TweetDeck product — which enables users to view a fast flow of tweets at once — would be for paying customers only.

    Meta has its legion of critics too, especially in Europe, and despite Instagram’s massive user base, they could slow the site’s development.

    The company is criticized mainly for its handling of personal data — the essential ingredient for targeted ads that help it rake in billions of dollars in profits every quarter.

    Mosseri said he regretted that the EU launch was delayed, but if Meta had waited for regulatory clarity from Brussels, Threads would remain “many, many, many, months away.”

    “I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important,” he added to Platformer, a tech news site.

    According to a source close to the matter, Meta was wary of a new law called the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which sets strict rules for the world’s “gatekeeper” internet companies.

    One rule restricts platforms from transferring personal data between products, as would potentially be the case between Threads and Instagram.

    Meta was called out for doing just that after it bought the messaging app WhatsApp, and European regulators will be on high alert to ensure that the company doesn’t do so illegally with Threads.

    Globally, the Threads hashtag on Twitter has garnered over a million tweets, with many users jokingly suggesting users would be returning to Twitter.

    “10 mins into threads app. Me coming back to Twitter,” one user wrote, sharing a video of a man sprinting.

    Another shared an image of Homer Simpson running back and forth between the Twitter and Threads logos.

    By midday local time Thursday, Threads was the top trending topic on Japan Twitter, but many users expressed concerns over data privacy.

    “Threads is run by Meta, isn’t it? It will definitely leak your real name or the game you are playing, or put you in the list of your workplace company friends,” wrote one user.

    Another said: “Meta loves to collect private information and I don’t trust the way it treats private information. I also have the impression that this is a company hated by EU, so I’m reluctant.” 

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  • Meta’s Twitter clone expected Thursday as Elon Musk drives users away with tech issues and new limits

    Meta’s Twitter clone expected Thursday as Elon Musk drives users away with tech issues and new limits

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    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is close to debuting his “sanely-run” competitor to Twitter.

    The owner of Facebook and Instagram will launch “Threads,” a text-based social media platform that will compete with Twitter, on Thursday, according to a new listing on Apple’s app store posted on Monday afternoon. The app also briefly appeared on Google’s app store for Android smartphones over the weekend, according to The Verge. (The listing was quickly removed)

    Threads will be built on Instagram, according to photo previews in the app store listing. Users can post through a Twitter-like user interface, and follow others through their Instagram handles.

    Meta has reportedly considered working on a new text-based social media network since late last year. But the social media company is launching the new service after a weekend of technical issues and temporary changes on its competitor Twitter that’s already driving users to competing social media platforms. 

    Bluesky, the Twitter-like social media platform launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, said that users might experience “some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic,” and even temporarily paused sign-ups to handle the inflow.

    And the changes at Twitter keep coming. On Monday, Twitter announced in a post that users would soon need to be verified in order to access Tweetdeck, a customizable dashboard popular with power users and businesses. (The most straightforward way to be verified is to sign up for Twitter Blue, the platform’s subscription service)

    Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

    Twitter stumbles

    Over the weekend, users were puzzled by technical issues and error messages that were ultimately revealed to be the result of deliberate changes to the platform.

    On Friday, Twitter quietly barred people from seeing posts if they were not logged into a Twitter account. Previously, anyone, even those without a Twitter account, could access the site. 

    Musk confirmed that the change was intentional, claiming on Friday the measure was temporary in order to counter “extreme levels of data scraping.” 

    “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote on the platform earlier that afternoon. 

    Then on Saturday afternoon, Musk said that he was imposing temporary limits on how many posts users could view per day, again to counter “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” Even Twitter’s paying subscribers were subject to viewing limits, albeit ones more generous than free users. 

    Musk, who says he is still involved in “product development” even after handing over the CEO position to former NBC executive Linda Yaccarino, griped over the weekend that A.I. developers were using Twitter’s content to train large language models. 

    “It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some A.I. startup’s outrageous valuation,” Musk tweeted Friday. 

    Twitter did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

    ‘Sanely-run’

    Musk, after taking over the company last October, has introduced a number of major changes to the social media platform. The company changed its moderation policies, allowing once-banned users back on the platform. It also launched a paid verification service, which stumbled as some users impersonated brands and public figures, and celebrities publicly stated they would never pay for verification.

    The disruption has knocked Twitter’s advertising revenue, which was down 59% year-on-year as of early June. 

    That left an opening that Meta hoped to fill. “Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” suggested one employee in an internal post, reported the New York Times in December.

    “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution,” said Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox at an internal meeting in early June, reported The Verge at the time.

    That quote pushed Musk to challenge Zuckerberg to a “cage match”, an offer the Meta CEO has accepted. There has, as of now, been no details as to when the fight might happen. 

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  • Meta’s Threads app rolls out first big batch of updates | CNN Business

    Meta’s Threads app rolls out first big batch of updates | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Meta’s Twitter rival app Threads on Tuesday rolled out its first major batch of updates since its launch two weeks ago as it works to maintain momentum.

    The new features include a translation button and a tab on users’ activity feed dedicated to showing who’s followed them, according to a post from Cameron Roth, a software engineer working on Threads.

    All new features should be available to iOS Threads users by the end of Tuesday, Roth said.

    Threads users have been clamoring for updates since its launch. The new app attracted over 100 million user sign-ups in less than a week, but it still lacks many of the features popular on Twitter and other platforms, including direct messaging and a robust search function.

    User engagement on Threads has dipped since its first week, according to web traffic analysis firm Similarweb. And Meta executives have teased plans to improve the app in hopes of getting users to keep coming back.

    “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily … The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Threads post Monday.

    Tuesday’s updates also include the ability to subscribe and receive notifications from accounts a user doesn’t follow and a “+” button that lets users follow new accounts from the replies on a post, as well as bug fixes and other improvements.

    Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who is overseeing Threads, has also hinted at plans to introduce a desktop version of the app as well as a feed of only accounts a user follows and an edit button.

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  • Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

    Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    In less than 48 hours, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads has surpassed 70 million sign-ups, upended the social media landscape and appears to have rattled Twitter enough that it is now threatening legal action against Meta.

    But even as users signed up for Threads in droves, with some clearly eager to flee the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the sudden success of Meta’s app could raise a new set of concerns.

    Meta has long been criticized for its market dominance, and for allegedly trying to choke off competition by copying and killing rival applications. Now, some competition experts and even some Threads users worry that if the new app’s traction continues, it may simply lead to the accumulation of even more power and dominance for Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    “The prospect of total monopoly by Meta, yikes,” wrote one user. “It’s a real problem for society when a few dozen people and companies own every single thing so that no alternative paradigms can exist that they don’t co-opt from the cradle,” replied another.

    Twitter had always been much smaller than Meta’s platforms, but it had an outsized influence in tech, media and politics. As Twitter faltered under Musk, though, a cottage industry emerged of smaller apps trying to capture some of its magic. Now more than any of them, Meta seems best positioned to claim the crown.

    Threads’ blockbuster launch this week highlights the uncomfortable reality of the modern digital economy: To potentially beat some of the biggest players in the industry, you might have to be a giant yourself.

    The overnight success of Threads is a testament both to the dissatisfaction with Musk’s ownership of Twitter and to the unique power and reach of one of Meta’s most important properties: Instagram.

    Instagram has more than two billion users, far more than the 238 million users Twitter reported having in the months before Musk took over. When new users sign up for Threads, which they do using an Instagram account, the app prompts them to follow all of their existing Instagram contacts with a single tap. It’s optional, but is easy to accept, and it takes a conscious decision to decline.

    By promoting Threads through Instagram, and by sharing Instagram user data with Threads to let people instantly recreate their social networks, Meta has significantly greased the onboarding process. That frictionless experience has allowed Threads to leapfrog what’s known in the industry as the “cold start” problem, in which a new platform struggles to gain new users because there are no other users there to attract them.

    Thanks to the Instagram integration, “that biggest problem, the chicken-egg problem, has been solved from the jump,” Reddit co-founder and venture investor Alexis Ohanian said in a video Thursday (posted, naturally, on Threads).

    That Threads appeared to clear that hurdle easily, Ohanian said, makes him “bullish” on the new app.

    But that same innovation that made signing up so many users so quickly may raise competition concerns, particularly in Europe where new antitrust rules for digital platforms are set to go into effect in a matter of months.

    “From a competition perspective this can be problematic because Meta can use it to leverage its market power and raise barriers to entry, as other rivals would not have the customer base Meta has via Instagram,” said Agustin Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the Brussels-based consumer advocacy organization BEUC.

    Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), “digital gatekeepers” — a term that’s expected to cover Meta and/or its subsidiaries — will be prohibited from combining a user’s data from multiple platforms without consent, Reyna said. Another restriction forbids requiring users to sign up for one platform as a condition of using another.

    Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri appeared to acknowledge those issues this week in an interview with The Verge. Threads won’t be launching in the EU for now, he said, because of “complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year” — a statement The Verge suggested was a reference to the DMA.

    The DMA was passed specifically to deal with the antitrust concerns raised by large tech platforms. That Threads apparently cannot (yet) comply with rules designed to protect competition underscores uncertainty about the app’s potential competitive impact.

    Meta’s approach to Threads could also revive longstanding criticisms about the company’s alleged practice of copying and killing rivals, particularly as Twitter has warned Meta it may sue over claims of trade secret theft (an allegation Meta denies).

    The issue isn’t limited to the realm of social media. As the world races to develop artificial intelligence, Threads represents a huge new opportunity for Meta to gather training data for its own AI technology, in a way that could help it catch up to industry leaders such as OpenAI and Google. That could complicate any attempt at a comprehensive analysis of what Threads means for competition in tech.

    Part of what makes the debate so complicated is Threads’ seemingly very real threat to Twitter.

    If Threads puts pressure on Twitter to improve its service, that is a form of competition between apps, said Geoffrey Manne, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based International Center for Law and Economics.

    But, he added, if it leads to a concentration of power in the social media industry more broadly, it could mean a reduction in competition overall. It all depends on how you define the market.

    “I’m inclined to say it does both simultaneously, and the ultimate consequences aren’t so clear,” Manne said.

    Rather than viewing it through the lens of a social media market, one helpful way to look at the issue is from the perspective of the advertising market, he said. It’s possible that once Threads introduces advertising — which Zuckerberg has said won’t happen until the app has increased to significant scale — Threads simply reinforces Meta’s advertising market power, Manne said. That could lead to further antitrust scrutiny for Meta even if the question about competition in social media is ambiguous.

    Jeff Blattner, a former DOJ antitrust official, said it can only benefit consumers to have Threads as a rival to Twitter.

    “Two platforms run by maniac billionaires are better than one,” he wrote on Threads — though if Threads is so successful as to effectively knock out Twitter altogether, then in some ways the original question about Meta’s dominance will still stand.

    Threads has one thing going for it that may nip any competition concerns in the bud: A commitment to integrate with the same open protocols used by other distributed social media alternatives, such as Mastodon.

    That would give users the option to migrate their accounts, along with all their follower data intact, to a rival like Mastodon that isn’t controlled by Meta.

    While that interoperability isn’t available yet, Mosseri has repeatedly highlighted it as a priority on his to-do list.

    When and if it happens, that could be a significant step. What may appear now as an audience grab by Meta could someday wind up being how millions of people were onboarded to a massive, decentralized social networking infrastructure that is not controlled by any single company, individual or organization.

    “This is why we think interoperability requirements are so important,” said Charlotte Slaiman, a competition expert at the Washington-based consumer group Public Knowledge. If users could port their entire social graph from one rival to another whenever they wanted, she said, “we could have more fair competition based on the quality of the product, not just incumbency advantage.”

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  • Meta’s Threads gets a highly requested ‘following feed’ | CNN Business

    Meta’s Threads gets a highly requested ‘following feed’ | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Meta on Tuesday launched a highly anticipated “following feed” option in its Threads app as part of its latest batch of updates that could help the new social platform further chip away at Twitter’s position in the market.

    The option to see a reverse chronological feed of posts from only accounts a user follows had been one of the most requested features since Threads launched earlier this month. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to a post requesting the feature, saying, “Ask and you shall receive.”

    The following feed, one of the central features of the Twitter experience, can be accessed on Threads by double tapping on the app’s home button.

    Meta has been steadily rolling out updates to Threads as it tries to keep users engaged in the new app. Threads had a hugely successful launch, topping 100 million sign-ups in its first week, but engagement has declined somewhat since then.

    Meta rolled out Threads as a barebones app — missing popular features such as direct messages and a robust search function — to take advantage of a weak moment at rival Twitter. Now, Meta executives have acknowledged that they must continue building out the app to keep the momentum going.

    “I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on the platform last week. “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily … The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention.”

    Tuesday’s round of updates also includes automatic translation of posts into a users’ default language, the ability for users to see posts they’ve liked in their settings, the option for private users to batch “approve all” follow requests and buttons to filter the activity feed by various types of interactions, according to the company.

    The changes followed another batch of updates last week, which included a translation button and the option to subscribe and receive notifications from accounts a user doesn’t follow.

    Meta’s ongoing work on Threads comes as the chaos at Twitter continues. Earlier this week, owner Elon Musk began doing away with the platform’s iconic bird branding and replacing it with “X” in hopes of building an “everything” app similar to China’s WeChat.

    As Musk rebrands the app, he could face a different threat from Meta: Facebook’s parent company is one of many businesses that already have intellectual property rights to the letter “X.”

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  • Elon Musk is the gift that keeps on giving to Mark Zuckerberg | CNN Business

    Elon Musk is the gift that keeps on giving to Mark Zuckerberg | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    At the start of last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.

    Revelations from hundreds of internal company documents, known as the Facebook Papers, had drawn sharp criticism from lawmakers, users and civil society groups in late 2021 and forced company executives to appear before Congress. Zuckerberg’s plan to rebrand Facebook as Meta and pivot to the so-called metaverse was met with broad skepticism. And the company’s core ad business was under significant pressure from privacy changes made by Apple.

    But then, the attention of lawmakers, media and the tech world writ large abruptly shifted to another tech billionaire: Elon Musk.

    Musk early last year criticized Twitter, then nearly joined its board, then agreed to buy the company before launching a monthslong and ultimately unsuccessful fight to get out of the deal. The saga, which only continued after Musk completed the deal and pushed through numerous controversial changes, often dominated news cycles. In the process, it seemed to make Twitter’s rivals look better managed and draw away critical attention that might otherwise have been focused on other tech giants, including Meta, as they went through painful layoffs and suffered declines on Wall Street.

    This week, however, Zuckerberg notched his biggest win from Musk yet. After years of trying and failing to capture Twitter’s audience with copycat features, Zuckerberg is now capitalizing on Twitter’s struggles with a new app called Threads. Meta’s Twitter clone launched this week to unprecedented success, despite Meta’s history of privacy violations and enabling election meddling, not to mention longstanding concerns that the company and Zuckerberg wield too much power over the social media market.

    The app’s overnight success was a direct result of the chaos under Musk’s leadership of Twitter since last October. During that time, he has managed to anger many of the platform’s users and advertisers with his erratic statements, mass layoffs and significant changes to Twitter’s policies. While Twitter users have lamented what Musk’s ownership has meant for the platform, it may be the best thing that could have happened for Zuckerberg.

    “Musk has done one thing after another to piss off his own user base,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School.

    Some early Threads users even commented on the strange nature of the situation — that they would be eager to join a social network run by one billionaire whose company has faced intense public criticism simply because they were so eager to get away from another.

    “It boggles the mind,” one user posted to Threads. “I boycotted Facebook years ago and when I heard about this I joined immediately.”

    “Never used [Facebook] nor [Instagram],” another user said, adding that they had to join Instagram for the first time to gain access to Threads. “Last thing I would have EVER expected was to use any platform of Zuckerberg’s.”

    And yet, by Friday, Zuckerberg said Threads had reached 70 million user signups — amassing a user base nearly a third of the size of Twitter’s in fewer than two days for a platform that could eventually help knock out one of Facebook’s chief rivals and give a boost to Meta’s struggling ad business.

    If Musk is a boon to Zuckerberg’s fortunes, he’s an unlikely one. Zuckerberg and Musk have often been at odds over the years.

    In 2018, in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk said he had deleted the Facebook pages for his companies Tesla and SpaceX because the platform “gives me the willies.” And later that year, he also deleted his Instagram account.

    More recently, Musk has claimed that Instagram “makes people depressed” and appeared to imply that Meta was complicit in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

    Zuckerberg has also thrown jabs at Musk, including after a SpaceX explosion accidentally blew up a satellite that was being used by Facebook, and in a critique of his stance on artificial intelligence during a 2017 Facebook Live broadcast.

    But earlier this year, Zuckerberg also complimented Musk’s leadership of Twitter. In a podcast interview last month, Zuckerberg said that “Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner … I think that those were generally good changes.”

    In some ways, Musk’s moves at Twitter may have given Zuckerberg and Meta — as well as other tech companies — cover to take similar actions without as much criticism. Meta announced it would eliminate more than 20,000 employees over two rounds of layoffs, marking the largest cuts in its history. But Meta came off looking responsible compared to Twitter’s mass layoffs by handling the cuts professionally and providing more robust severance.

    After Musk restored the account of former President Donald Trump following a two-year suspension that began after the January 6 attack, Twitter faced criticism from civil society civic? groups who called on advertisers to boycott the platform. But Meta, along with YouTube, followed suit several months later (although those platforms cited their own risk analyses, rather than Musk’s leadership, in explaining their decisions).

    The distraction and chaos of Musk’s Twitter takeover could hardly have come at a better time for Zuckerberg and Meta.

    The social media giant’s business had a brutal year — posting its first-ever quarterly revenue decline as a public company during the June quarter, and then again in each of the two remaining quarters of the year, as it struggled with a weak online advertising market while pouring billions into its plan for the metaverse. The company lost more than $600 billion in market value during 2022.

    Now, the launch of Threads marks a huge new opportunity for Meta and Zuckerberg. Threads could be a way of getting social media users to spend even more time on Meta’s apps, especially as Facebook increasingly struggles with the perception of being a has-been platform that’s less attractive to younger users.

    Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that he hopes to eventually have more than one billion users on Threads, far more than the 238 million active users on Twitter prior to Musk’s takeover.

    Although there are no ads on the platform yet, Threads could also ultimately supplement Meta’s core advertising business. Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who oversaw the Threads launch, told The Verge in an interview about the new platform this week that, “if we make something that lots of people love and keep using, we will, I’m sure, monetize it” through advertising.

    For Musk, losing Twitter users, or having its future growth hamstrung, thanks to Threads, could mean further harm to the $44 billion investment he made to buy the social media platform — and, perhaps more importantly, to his reputation as a genius with a knack for turning around troubled companies.

    Musk appears to be trying to push back against Zuckerberg’s turn of fortune. On Wednesday, a lawyer for Musk sent a letter to Meta threatening to sue the company over the rival app, accusing it of trade secret theft through the hiring of former Twitter employees. (Meta denied the charge.)

    The Twitter-Threads battle has raised the stakes for another fight: a cage fight that Musk and Zuckerberg have spent the past several weeks planning. Zuckerberg, a regular practitioner of Brazilian jiu jitsu, appears to have the upper hand.

    But whether or not the fight ends up going forward, Zuckerberg seems to have already won.

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  • Tired of Elon Musk? Here are the Twitter alternatives you should know about | CNN Business

    Tired of Elon Musk? Here are the Twitter alternatives you should know about | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October and began upending the platform, there weren’t many viable alternatives for frustrated users. Now, there may be too many.

    A growing number of services have launched or gained traction in recent months by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with Musk’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, overhaul the verification process, reinstate numerous incendiary accounts and most recently impose temporary read limits on tweets.

    Bluesky, Mastodon and Spill are among the many social apps vying for users over the last several months, with services that look and feel strikingly similar to Twitter. But now this increasingly crowded marketplace may be disrupted by the most dominant social media company: Meta.

    Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, launched Wednesday and amassed more than 70 million sign-ups as of Friday morning thanks to a decision to tie the app to Instagram. Its user base is already far more than newer rivals and puts Threads on pace to rapidly catch up to Twitter, which had 238 million active users last year before Musk took the company private.

    In interviews, some other Twitter competitors took jabs at Meta’s effort and expressed confidence in their ability to grow and maintain an audience, even if it ends up being much smaller than what Mark Zuckerberg’s company can attract.

    “Threads leans heavily on celebrities and people with large Instagram followings, and therefore risks being more of a megaphone for the established, rather than something for everyone,” Sarah Oh, a former Twitter employee and founder of rival app T2, told CNN in an email.

    Spill co-founder and CEO Alphonzo Terrell said the company is “thrilled to see so much innovation in the social space” and remains “confident in our roadmap.”

    Here’s what you should know about the current crop of services trying to take on Twitter.

    Threads is Meta’s long-anticipated answer to Twitter and the biggest threat to the social network Musk bought for $44 billion. Threads is intended to offer a space for real-time conversations online, a function that has long been Twitter’s core selling point, and it’s doing so in part by adoption many of Twitter’s most recognizable features.

    The app has already attracted a long list of celebrities, brands and other VIP users, as well as many who clearly appear to be frustrated with Musk’s Twitter. And Zuckerberg isn’t just looking to catch up to Twitter; he wants to build a service that’s far larger.

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

    Launched by former Twitter employees, Spill says it strives to be a “visual conversation at the speed of culture.”

    The site is visual heavy and pushes GIFs, memes and video, making it more of a destination for creative communities. Spill has also emerged as a haven for Black Twitter users and marginalized communities seeking a safe space online.

    While the traction for Threads was unique, Spill has gained recently, too. Last weekend, amid renewed chaos at Twitter over the read limits, Spill gained “hundreds of thousands of new users,” according to Terrell, the CEO.

    T2, another service created by former Twitter employees, offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. The key selling point that sets it apart from others is its focus on safety, according to Oh, the founder.

    “We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN in February.

    In a statement this week, Oh doubled down on safety as a possible differentiator with Threads as well, raising the question of whether Meta had “learned from their past mistakes” after years of scrutiny on its struggles to police its own platforms.

    Bluesky, a service backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, looks identical to Twitter, with one key difference. The app runs on a decentralized network, which provides users more control over how the service is run, the data is stored, and the content is moderated.

    Bluesky was formed independently of Twitter while Dorsey was serving as CEO but it was funded by the company until it became an independent organization in February 2022. In a tweet introducing the idea in 2019, Dorsey said it also plans to “build an open community around it, inclusive of companies & organizations, researchers, civil society leaders,” but warned “this isn’t going to happen overnight.”

    This week, Dorsey appeared to acknowledge that the market is now flooded with “Twitter clones.”

    Also built on decentralized networks, Mastodon launched before Musk took over Twitter but skyrocketed in popularity after the acquisition.

    Mastodon lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter or Instagram. Mastodon is also free of ads. It’s developed by a nonprofit run by Eugen Rochko, who created Mastodon in 2016.

    After joining, users pick a server, with options from general-interest servers such as mastodon.world; regional servers like sfba.social, which is aimed at people in the San Francisco Bay Area; and ones aimed at various interests (many servers review new sign-ups before approving them.)

    Launched publicly in June 2022, Cohost offers a text-based social media feed with followers, reposts, likes and comments, similar to Twitter. However, the product is chronologically based with no ads, no trending topics and no displayed interactions (think hidden like counts and follower lists).

    Part of Cohost’s goal is to create a less hostile space for open dialogue, according to the website.

    “People who hear ‘Facebook has a Twitter replacement now!’ and don’t immediately run for the hills are unlikely to be interested in anything we’re doing,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of anti-software software club, the company that develops cohost. “We’re in separate market niches. I doubt they’re going to do anything to try and appeal to our users, and we’re not going to do anything to try and appeal to their users.”

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  • Twitter threatens to sue Meta after rival app Threads gains traction | CNN Business

    Twitter threatens to sue Meta after rival app Threads gains traction | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Twitter is threatening Meta with a lawsuit after the blockbuster launch of Meta’s new Twitter rival, Threads — in perhaps the clearest sign yet that Twitter views the app as a competitive threat.

    On Wednesday, an attorney representing Twitter sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter that accused the company of trade secret theft through the hiring of former Twitter employees.

    The letter was first reported by Semafor. A person familiar with the matter confirmed the letter’s authenticity to CNN.

    The letter by Alex Spiro, an outside lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk, alleged that Meta had engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

    In response to reports on the letter, Musk tweeted: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

    The letter goes on to say that Meta hired former Twitter employees who “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices” and that Meta “deliberately” involved these employees in developing Threads.

    “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights,” Spiro continued, “and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”

    Meta spokesperson Andy Stone flatly dismissed the letter. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said on Threads.

    In the months since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, the social network has been challenged by a growing number of smaller microblogging platforms, such as the decentralized social network Mastodon and Bluesky, an alternative backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. But Twitter has not threatened either with litigation.

    Unlike some Twitter rivals, Threads has experienced rapid growth, with Zuckerberg reporting 30 million user sign-ups in the app’s first day. As of Thursday afternoon, Threads was the number-one free app on the iOS App Store.

    The legal threat may not necessarily lead to litigation but it could be part of a strategy to slow down Meta, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

    “Sometimes lawyers, they threaten but don’t follow through. Or they see how far they can go. That may be the case, but I don’t know that for sure,” Tobias told CNN. He added: “There may be some value to tying it up in litigation and complicating life for Meta.”

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  • Twitter’s future is in doubt as Threads tops 100 million users | CNN Business

    Twitter’s future is in doubt as Threads tops 100 million users | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter has weathered months, if not years, of mismanagement as well as mass layoffs, frequent service disruptions and an exodus of top advertisers, but the launch of a rival app from Meta could prove to be the final straw.

    Threads surpassed 100 million users this weekend, less than a week after it launched, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday, marking a staggering feat for any social network and one that puts it on pace to rapidly pass Twitter’s audience size.

    Meanwhile, multiple internet traffic analysts reported noticeable declines in Twitter usage in just the past few days. The results underscore the risk Meta poses to Twitter’s business and raise questions about how, or if, Twitter can stem its losses.

    Twitter traffic had already been trending downward for months, according to data from the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare and the web analytics firm Similarweb. But the pace of decline appears to have accelerated in recent days, both companies said, likely reflecting strong interest in Threads and a mass migration from the platform owned by Elon Musk to the one run by Zuckerberg.

    Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    On Sunday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince shared a chart showing Twitter’s popularity relative to other websites it tracks. “Twitter traffic tanking,” Prince said as he posted the chart.

    The chart showed that in January, Twitter was ranked 32nd on the list; the next month, it had fallen to 34th. For much of the spring, Twitter fluctuated between 35th place and 37th. But the beginning of July showed a rapid falloff in popularity, as Twitter plunged to 40th place. (Cloudflare defines popularity as the “size of a population of users that look up a domain per unit of time.”)

    Similarweb told CNN Monday it has witnessed comparable trends in Twitter traffic.

    “In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, [last] Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week and down 11% compared with July 6 and 7, 2022,” said David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb. “We’ve been reporting for a while that Twitter is down compared with last year – June traffic was down 4% – but Threads seems to be taking a bigger bite out of it.”

    Bolstering the traffic reports were the anecdotal experiences of some Threads users. Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said Saturday he ran an “unscientific test” of how the same post he shared on Twitter, Threads and Mastodon, another rival, performed with his audience over a 23-hour period.

    The identical content Stamos created on each platform saw significantly more engagement on Threads than on Twitter as measured by likes and replies — despite having a fraction of his usual reach on the newer platform, he said.

    Stamos, who has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter but only a tenth of that number on Threads, added that strong Threads engagement with his posts describing the “research” also supported the original findings. The quality of the replies to his posts were also much higher on non-Twitter platforms, he observed.

    “From my perspective, Twitter is done as a platform for serious tech conversations,” Stamos said, who previously was the chief security officer at Facebook.

    Fueling Threads’ rapid growth has been Meta’s use of Instagram as a springboard to sign up new users, along with what many Threads users have identified as a dissatisfaction with Twitter.

    Threads started out with a number of celebrity accounts prepopulating its platform but has since gained additional high-profile users including Kim Kardashian and Jeff Bezos. An account that had been banned from Twitter that tracks the movements of Musk’s private jet has also joined the new platform.

    More than 100 US lawmakers have signed up as well, Axios reported last week, though few world leaders appear to be on Threads at the moment.

    Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri have emphasized that Threads is about more than replacing Twitter and that the app seeks to tap audiences outside of Twitter’s traditional user base. That means Threads will not actively elevate news or political content, Mosseri said, describing those topics as “not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”

    Over the weekend, Mosseri’s stance on news and politics triggered a debate over Threads’ approach to those topics. Some users praised it as a way to make the platform more accessible to average users, who may never have embraced Twitter before. Others argued that many of the topics Mosseri characterized as non-political, including music, fashion and entertainment, are their own source of news and can be inherently political.

    Even as Meta’s executives look to put some daylight between Threads and Twitter, the rapid rise of Threads only appears to have deepened Musk’s longtime feud with Zuckerberg. The app’s launch prompted threats of litigation as Twitter has accused Meta of trade secret theft, not to mention talk of a physical cage fight between Musk and Zuckerberg.

    On Sunday, Musk, who is known for erratic behavior and incendiary remarks, made it even more personal as he lobbed a sexual insult at Zuckerberg and proposed comparing the size of their respective genitalia.

    Zuckerberg has not directly responded to the insult. But after a Threads user pointed out that the new app was not featured in Twitter’s trending topics tab, Zuckerberg replied “Concerning” with a crying-laughter emoji. And he used the same emoji to reply to a post by the fast-food brand Wendy’s, which had suggested Zuckerberg should “go to space just to really make him mad lol.”

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  • Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 | CNN Business

    Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Meta has made cuts to its teams that tackle disinformation and coordinated troll and harassment campaigns on its platforms, people with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN, raising concerns ahead of the pivotal 2024 elections in the US and around the world.

    Several members of the team that countered mis- and disinformation in the 2022 US midterms were laid off last fall and this spring, a person familiar with the matter said. The staffers are part of a global team that works on Meta’s efforts to counter disinformation campaigns seeking to undermine confidence in or sow confusion around elections.

    The news comes as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is celebrating the unparalleled success of its new Threads platform, surpassing 100 million users just five days after launch and opening a potential new avenue for bad actors.

    A Meta spokesperson did not specify, when asked, how many staffers had been cut from its teams working on elections. In a statement to CNN on Monday night, the spokesperson said, “Protecting the US 2024 elections is one of our top priorities, and our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.”

    The spokesperson did not answer CNN questions about what additional resources had been deployed to monitor and moderate its new platform. Instead, Meta said the social media giant had invested $16 billion in technology and teams since 2016 to protect its users.

    But the decision to lay off staffers ahead of 2024, when elections will not only take place in the United States but also in Taiwan, Ukraine, India and elsewhere, has raised concerns among those with direct knowledge of Meta’s election integrity work.

    The disparate nature of Meta’s work on elections makes it difficult for even people inside the company to say specifically how many people are part of the effort. One group of relevant employees hit harder by the layoffs were “content review” specialists who manually review election-related posts that may violate Meta’s terms of service, a person familiar with the cuts told CNN.

    Meta is trying to offset those cuts by more proactively detecting accounts that spread false election-related information, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

    For years, the social media giant has invested heavily in teams of personnel to root out sophisticated and coordinated networks of fake accounts. That “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as Meta calls it, began in the lead up to the 2016 election when an infamous Russian government-linked troll operation ran amuck on Facebook.

    The team tasked with combating the influence campaigns – which includes former US government and intelligence officials – has been generally seen as the most robust in the social media industry. The company has published quarterly reports in recent years that expose governments and other entities found to have been operating covert campaigns pushing disinformation on Meta’s platforms.

    Those teams investigating disinformation campaigns now must further prioritize which campaigns and countries to focus on, another person familiar with the situation said, a trade-off that could result in some deceptive efforts going unnoticed.

    The person emphasized that Meta still has a dedicated team of professionals working on these issues, many of whom are widely respected in the cyber and information security communities.

    But while artificial intelligence and other automated systems can help detect some of these efforts, unearthing sophisticated disinformation networks is still a “very manual process” that involves intense scrutiny from expert staff, another person with direct knowledge of Meta’s counter disinformation efforts told CNN.

    The person said they feared Meta was regressing from progress it had made from learning from past mistakes. “Lessons that were learned at great costs,” they said, citing the company’s 2018 admission that its platforms were used to incite violence in Myanmar.

    In addition to its in-house team, Meta and other social media companies rely on tips from academics and other researchers who specialize in monitoring covert disinformation networks.

    Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said he has sent the company valuable tips in recent months, but Meta’s response time has slowed significantly.

    Linvill, who has a long track record of successfully identifying covert online accounts, including helping to unearth a Russian election meddling effort in Africa in 2020, said that Meta recently removed a network of Russian language accounts that were posting both pro and anti-Ukraine content on Facebook and Instagram.

    “They were trying to stoke anger on both sides of the debates,” he said.

    Launched last Thursday, Threads has become an instant success with celebrities, politicians, and journalists flocking to the platform.

    The new Twitter-style app is tied to users’ existing Instagram accounts, rather than being linked directly to Facebook. Currently, Threads shares the same community standards as Instagram, but the platforms differ on issues relating to Meta’s methods to combat disinformation.

    Meta also applies labels to state-controlled accounts on Facebook and Instagram, such as Russia’s Sputnik news agency and China’s CCTV. However, these labels do not appear on state-controlled accounts on Threads.

    The launch of Threads even as Meta trims its disinformation-focused personnel comes at a turbulent and transformative time for those tasked with writing and implementing rules on social media platforms.

    Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter last year, has all but torn up that platform’s rule book and gutted the team that worked on implementing policies designed to combat disinformation efforts.

    Last month, YouTube, which has also made job cuts, announced it would allow videos that feature the false claim the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, a reversal of its previous policy.

    The rule reversals come as the Republican-controlled House of Representatives investigates interactions between technology companies and the federal government.

    Last week, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered some Biden administration agencies and top officials not to communicate with social media companies about certain content, handing a win to GOP states in a lawsuit accusing the government of going too far in its effort to combat Covid-19 disinformation.

    The restrictions and the scrutiny could give cover to social media companies that may want to pull back on some of their platforms’ rules around election integrity, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook official who helped lead the company’s global election efforts until 2021.

    “I can [almost] hear [Meta Global Affairs President] Nick Clegg saying that ‘we’re going to be cautious of what we do, because we wouldn’t want to run afoul of the law,’” Harbath said.

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  • Threads now has ‘tens of millions’ of daily users. But its honeymoon phase may be over | CNN Business

    Threads now has ‘tens of millions’ of daily users. But its honeymoon phase may be over | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Two weeks after Meta launched its Twitter competitor Threads and received an unprecedented amount of user signups, the frenzy around the app appears to have come back to Earth.

    After surpassing 100 million user sign-ups in less than a week, user engagement on Threads has slowed. Threads daily active users fell from 49 million on July 7, two days after its launch, to 23.6 million users last Friday, according to a report published this week by web traffic analysis firm Similarweb. The app’s average usage time also fell from 21 minutes to 6 minutes over the same timeframe.

    The slowdown hints at the challenges ahead for Meta as it looks to not only draw users away from Twitter but build a service that reaches a far larger audience. Threads is already facing some of the common issues that often plague social media platforms, including user retention, spam and some early regulatory scrutiny around its approach to content moderation. It’s also not clear yet how much Meta’s investments in building Threads will actually amount to financial returns for the company.

    “I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on the platform Monday. “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily … The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention.”

    Meta executives acknowledged in the early days after Threads’ launch that getting users to sign up for a buzzy new app is much easier than convincing them to continue engaging there long-term. That’s likely even more true for Threads, which launched as a relatively bare-bones app in an effort to capitalize on a moment of weakness at Twitter and also tapped into Instagram’s network to ease the sign-in process.

    Threads on Tuesday rolled out its first batch of updates to the iOS version of the app, including a translation button, a tab on users’ activity feed dedicated to showing who’s followed them and the option to subscribe and receive notifications from accounts a user doesn’t follow.

    Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who is overseeing the Threads launch, has also hinted at plans to add features such as a desktop version of the app, a feed of only accounts a user follows and an edit button. “We’re clearly way out over our skis on this,” Mosseri said in a Threads post the week of the app’s launch.

    In the meantime, Threads is grappling with a common social media issue — spam. Users have complained of replies to posts filling up with spammy links and offering “giveaways” in exchange for new followers. And on Monday, Mosseri said in a Threads post that the platform was “going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits” because “spam attacks have picked up.”

    This “is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” Mosseri warned. “If you get caught up [in] those protections let us know.”

    Meta declined to clarify whether Mosseri’s post refers to limits on users’ ability to post or read content, or to provide any additional details. But the comment did prompt some snark from Twitter owner Elon Musk, after backlash to Twitter’s own rate limits — restrictions on how many tweets users can read — helped propel Threads’ early growth.

    Meta shares have jumped more than 6% since the Threads launch, but some analysts who follow the company are skeptical that Threads will quickly contribute to the company’s bottom line, if at all.

    Threads could be a way for Meta to eke additional engagement time out of its massive existing user base. The app could also ultimately supplement Meta’s core advertising business, which could use a boost after facing challenges from a broad decline in the online ad market and changes to Apple’s app privacy practices.

    Meta executives have said they will likely incorporate advertising into the platform, once its user base has reached critical mass. But even if Threads continues to add users, “advertisers could be hesitant and possibly wait before allocating ad dollars to Threads because of their uncertainty about long-run user retention and engagement,” Morningstar senior equity analyst Ali Mogharabi said in a recent investor note.

    Like Twitter, Threads could also struggle to attract advertisers because the nature of a real-time news and public conversations app means the content is sometimes negative or controversial. Even before Musk took over Twitter and alienated advertisers, the platform represented a tiny piece of the ad sales market compared to Meta’s properties.

    Threads, however, likely has a leg up on Twitter because Meta is known as a company that provides clear value for advertisers, said Scott Kessler, global tech sector lead at research firm Third Bridge. If anything, he said, the risk may be that some advertisers may think twice about spending on yet another Meta platform versus diversifying their ad strategy.

    For now, analysts will be awaiting Meta executives’ commentary about Threads during its quarterly earnings call next week, including to see if they offer any hints about whether ads may be rolled out on the app ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season.

    “They launched this in July,” Kessler said. “That should give them enough time to build out sufficient tools for holiday shopping season advertising.”

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