Meta takes aim at Twitter with the launch of rival app Threads
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The battle of the social media giants took a new turn last week as Meta unveiled an app to rival Twitter. On Thursday, the company launched Threads, their new platform which appears to target users looking for an alternative to the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
The new App is billed as a text-based version of Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram that the company says provides “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”
The app is reportedly live in Apple and Google Android app stores in more than 100 countries including the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan.
The company said, “Our vision is that Threads will be a new app more focused on text and dialogue, modeled after what Instagram has done for photo and video.” Users will get a Twitter-like microblogging experience, according to screenshots provided to the media.
Thread posts are limited to 500 characters, which is more than Twitter’s 280- character threshold, and can include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long. Instagram users will be able to log in with their existing user names and follow the same accounts on the new app. New users will have to set up an Instagram account. There are buttons to like, repost, reply to or quote a “thread,” and counters showing the number of likes and replies that a post has received.
Meta emphasized its measures to keep users safe, including enforcing Instagram’s community guidelines and providing tools to control who can mention or reply to users. Hpever, Meta’s new offering of Threads has raised data privacy concerns. It is capable of collecting a wide range of personal information, including health, financial, contacts, browsing and search history, location data, purchases and “sensitive info,” according to its data privacy disclosure on the App Store.