Twitter users shifting to Meta’s Threads

NEW YORK: Celebrities, lawmakers, 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.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a Threads post on 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.

Ann Coleman is among them. The 50-year-old, who lives in Baltimore, said she joined Threads after hearing about the platform from a comedian she follows on social media. She said she loves Twitter and has been using it for more than 10 years. She even met her husband there.

But Coleman, who is politically progressive, has been looking to switch to a new platform because of Musk’s political views and changes he’s made to Twitter, like upending its verification system. She previously joined the decentralized social network Mastodon, but found it a bit confusing to use.

She said she likes Threads but wishes she could easily follow all her Twitter friends there. Threads gives Instagram users the option to automatically follow the same accounts they do on the photo-sharing app, which makes it easier for active Instagram users to replicate a similar type of engagement on Threads. But others starting from the ground up will have to do more work.

“If I’m going to leave Twitter entirely, I’m going to have to try and find some of these people” from Twitter, Coleman said.

Michael Evancoe, 28, said he has not used Twitter much since his personal page was suspended years ago. Evancoe, who now works in production, said he agrees with some of the changes Musk has been making on Twitter and he created a new account earlier this year. But he was not able to gain many followers or interactions.

He joined Threads last week, and says he has been able to interact more with other users. But he hopes that Meta does not moderate the platform overly aggressively.

“I think that would be a deterrent to both interest and engagement as well,” Evancoe said.

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 on Friday.

In the first two full days that Threads was broadly available traffic on Twitter was down 5 percent compared with the same period a week ago, and down 11 percent 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.

To Jennifer Billinson, a professor of media studies at Nazareth University in New York, the first days of Threads have highlighted a potential culture clash specifically one between Twitter refugees and what is likely a much larger number of people just clicking over from Instagram.

The idea that Threads will just become a Twitter clone, she says, is running headlong into the reality that the Twitterites are going to be “vastly outnumbered” on the new platform by those from Instagram, which has more than 2 billion monthly users. By comparison, Twitter has more than 237 million daily users, according to the most recent figures from the company’s earnings report last year.

Among other things, those used to the more abrasive culture of Twitter could easily annoy more laid-back Instagram users. Of course, such tensions might be alleviated by potential platform changes that give people more control over what they’ll see in their Threads feed. At the moment, users are largely at the mercy of the Threads algorithm.