Meta Promises Threads Will Be Different. Cue the Skepticism
Critics fear the Twitter knockoff will be just another way for the company to gobble up lucrative data.
Illustration: Jay Daniel Wright for Bloomberg Businessweek
For years it’s seemed as if Meta Platforms Inc.’s viral-growth days are behind it. Its main products are so big, they’re adding users at progressively slower rates, and the company, which turns 20 in February, has become a symbol of everything unpopular about modern social media and the US tech industry. Yet its latest venture, Threads, a service best described as a straightforward Twitter knockoff, caught fire immediately. Within four days, 100 million users had signed up.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s business instincts are to acquire, copy or smother rival social media products. He’s wanted to take a direct shot at Twitter Inc. for years—he even tried to buy it in 2008 for $500 million—but never succeeded. In large part, Zuckerberg can thank Elon Musk for helping him get his mojo back with Threads. Since taking over Twitter last October, Musk has made a series of rash decisions that have alienated many of its core users. This has provided opportunity for upstart alternatives such as Bluesky and Mastodon, but nothing had succeeded in gaining anything approaching real scale until Threads came along.