Mark Zuckerberg took a swipe at Elon Musk’s Twitter on Thursday as his competitor to the platform, Threads, announced 10 million sign-ups within hours of its launch.
The chief executive and founder of Meta used his new Threads account to say Twitter had not “nailed” its opportunity to become a mega app and that his copycat version would be “focusing on kindness”.
Zuckerberg’s competitive move against Twitter has already resulted in Musk challenging his fellow billionaire to a cage fight, with the Meta boss appearing to accept the offer of a bout. Appropriately, Zuckerberg said in an exchange with a mixed martial arts fighter on Threads that Twitter had not taken its chance to become a leading platform.
Replying on his new Threads account to MMA fighter Mike Davis, who had asked if Threads could become bigger than Twitter, Zuckerberg wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1bn+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Zuckerberg added in an exchange with another user that “we are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place”.
Twitter has been criticised since it was bought by Musk for reinstating previously banned accounts such as those for Donald Trump and misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. Musk, who has more than 146 million followers on Twitter, did not tweet about Threads directly on Thursday, although he tweeted gnomically after the launch that he “must confess to a deep love of fashion & architecture”.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said early adopters of the Twitter rival included Jennifer Lopez, Coldplay and American football star Tom Brady as it revealed initial user numbers. The 10 million figure – within seven hours of the Threads launch – compares with about 13 million for another Twitter competitor, Mastodon, but is far behind Twitter’s user count of more than 250 million.
Threads is freely available in 100 countries including the UK, US and Australia and users need an Instagram account to log on to it. Instagram has 2 billion users and account holders can transfer their follower list on to their new Threads account.
However, the Zuckerberg lieutenant overseeing the launch, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, said in an interview that the new app was aiming for cultural relevance over size.
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“It would be great if it gets really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in if it becomes culturally relevant than if it gets hundreds of millions of users,” Mosseri told tech news site The Verge.
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