Threads by Meta: A Safer Alternative to Twitter Drama

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Celebrities, lawyers, 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.

But the real 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.

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.

In the first two full days that Threads were widely available — Thursday and Friday of last week — traffic on Twitter was down 5% compared with the same period a week ago, and down 11% compared with the same period a year ago, according to the web analytics company SimilarWeb. But it also said Twitter traffic has experienced an overall decline even in the absence of Threads.