Last Update: July 06, 2023, 05:58 AM IST
United States of America, USA)
This photo taken in New York on Wednesday, July 5, 2023, shows the logo of Meta’s new app Threads and the Twitter logo on the left. (AP Photo)
Threads can collect a wide range of personal information including health, financial, contacts, browsing and search history, location data, purchases and “sensitive information”.
meta on thursday launched threadsA text-based alternative to Twitter is posing a significant challenge to the beleaguered platform owned by Elon Musk.
“Let’s do it. Welcome to Threads,” Meta chief executive and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his first post on the nascent platform, according to AFP.
Meta unveiled an app to rival Twitter, targeting users looking for an alternative to the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.
The new app is pitched as a text-based version of Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram, with the company saying it offers “real-time updates and a new, separate space for public conversations”.
The app went live on the Apple and Google Android app stores in more than 100 countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan, after midnight on Wednesday in the UK.
Users will get a Twitter-like microblogging experience, according to screenshots provided to the media, which suggests Meta is gearing up to challenge the platform directly after a series of changes as a result of Musk’s ownership.
In a statement, Meta said, “Our vision is that Threads will be a new app focused more on text and dialogue than what Instagram has done for photos and videos.”
Posts are limited to 500 characters, which exceeds Twitter’s 280-character limit, and can include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.
Instagram users will be able to log in with their existing usernames and follow the same accounts on the new app. New users will have to create an Instagram account.
Meta emphasized measures to keep users safe, including implementing Instagram’s community guidelines and providing tools to control who can mention or reply to users. However, one place where Threads won’t be rolling out is in the European Union, which has strict data privacy regulations.
Read more, Meta’s ‘Threads’ app, Twitter rival, will block launch in Europe due to regulatory concerns
Commission spokesman Graham Doyle said Meta has informed Ireland’s data privacy commission that it has no plans yet to launch Threads in the block of 27 countries. The Irish watchdog is Meta’s main privacy regulator for the European Union as the company’s regional headquarters are based in Dublin.
The launch of Threads could prove to be a new headache for Musk, who last year acquired Twitter for US$44 billion.
They have made a series of changes that have triggered a backlash, the latest being a daily limit on the number of tweets people can see, to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data.
They are also now requiring payment verification for users to access TweetDeck, their online dashboard.
(with agency inputs)
