Threads passes 100 million users in less than a week

Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to dethrone Twitter has early sign of success, but questions about momentum remain

Meta is seeing early success with more than 100 million downloads less than one week after it launched. EPA

In less than one week, Meta's newest social media platform, Threads, has managed to amass 100 million users around the world.

Downloads of the app have broken the previous record set by AI tool ChatGPT, which took two months to cross the 100 million user mark, according to AFP, citing data tracking websites.

Though this is impressive in terms of how quickly Threads accumulated 100 million users, for perspective, Facebook has about 2.9 billion users and Instagram, also owned by Meta, has 2 billion, according to Statista, a provider of market and consumer data.

As for the platform that many say is the chief rival of Threads, Twitter, various data sets show that it has 300 to 500 million users, leaving a large chasm for Threads to close.

Several days before Threads reached the 100 million user mark, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino tweeted a thinly veiled reference to its newest competitor.

“We're often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” she wrote. “You built the Twitter community, and that's irreplaceable.”

Other responses from Twitter regarding Threads have not been so subtle.

Less than 48 hours after Threads went live, Twitter lawyers sent a letter to Meta alleging “wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property”.

The interfaces of Twitter and Threads do bear a striking resemblance, but court precedent in the US provides more of a grey area in terms of how successful Twitter might be if it chooses to litigate.

Litigation could take years and drain valuable resources from Elon Musk's X Corp, owner of Twitter.

Meta's Threads launched on July 6, and within the first hours of its availability, secured more than 5 million users and dominated much of the attention from tech pundits and social media prognosticators.

Threads owed a lot of its initial success to its integration into another Meta social media platform, Instagram, which made it easy for users to quickly create accounts, and perhaps more importantly, allow users to follow accounts they already followed on Instagram.

“We built Threads with tools to enable positive, productive conversations,” read an email provided by Meta shortly after the debut of Threads.

“Your feed on Threads includes threads posted by people you follow, and recommended content from new creators you haven’t discovered yet. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to five minutes in length.”

The real challenge for Threads, as is the case with many social media platforms, will be whether or not there's sustained user interest.

Google+ was launched in 2011 as a competitor to Facebook and amassed approximately 200 million users, but user engagement stalled, and the platform was shuttered several years later.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, hinted at the potential difficulty in the months ahead shortly after Threads launched, despite the surge in sign-ups.

“The real test is not if we can build up a lot of hype, but if you all find enough value in the app to keep using it over time,” he posted to the Threads platform.