Insights from the inaugural week: Twitter's survival beyond Threads

Shafaq News / With more than 100 million users signing up in five days and Elon Musk rattled into tweeting explicit jibes about Mark Zuckerberg, it's been quite a first week for Meta's new app Threads.

After months of speculation, the company behind Facebook picked the perfect moment to launch its shameless Twitter rival and it's already the fastest-growing app ever.

For many, it was the opportunity they'd waited for ever since Musk bought the bird app to pack their bags, wave goodbye to their tweets, and hope plenty of their followers would join them on their journey to the sunny climes of another data-hungry social media platform owned by another controversial billionaire.

But while it may look an awful lot like Twitter, with its text-focused timeline encouraging replies and conversation, its first week has shown you don't have to dig far below the surface to find the strategy isn't quite so similar.

Threads feels a bit like a summer beach hut full of annoyingly cool people who wouldn't look out of place in the new Barbie film.

It should probably come as little surprise, given the app's built off of Instagram, where influencers, celebrities, and brands reign supreme. Among the most followed are Kim Kardashian, MrBeast, and Shakira.

Elon Musk would like Twitter to be the Oppenheimer in this cinematic analogy, a place for more serious conversation and thoughtful debate. Unfortunately, it's long felt like it's got to the part where the nuclear bomb's gone off.

Much like Twitter, Meta has pitched Threads as a place to "join public conversations".

Scroll through your timeline, though, and you'll more likely find inspirational quotes, harmless memes, travel posts, and insufferable interactions between brands than anything particularly meaningful.

It feels, as social media expert Matt Navarra says, "a bit frivolous".

"It's quite a fun place to be, and the lack of established norms is part of the appeal," he says. "But some people find the content cheap and lacking quality or purpose.

"It's like Twitter with an Instagram wrapper on it."

Helping make this divide all the more stark is the fact that Threads' mantra seems to be "anything but news and politics". Or if you're going to talk about it, please don't bother the rest of us.

Early analysis by Website Planet suggests news outlets have just 1% of the follower count they have on Twitter on Threads. Brands have seen much higher take-up, and are also getting more likes and replies than on Twitter.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Threads, posted: "There are more than enough amazing communities to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news."

Mark Zuckerberg's goading of Musk would certainly suggest he sees Threads as a Twitter killer, but it's hard to see Musk's platform being killed off while it retains its reputation as a place where news breaks.

This time last summer, Boris Johnson's premiership began to collapse in real-time on Twitter - it's hard to see a similar event unfolding on Threads in its current form, with politicians largely absent from the platform.

Navarra says: "If the goal's to be a global town square, news and politics is a key component.

"It's early and that could become the case with Threads, but it feels like it's not the kind of content that's going to work. The relevancy of Twitter is quite hard to recreate.

"I don't think people can delete Twitter quite yet, which will be frustrating and distressing for some!"

(Skynews)