Twitter and Meta’s new text-based platform Threads are at war. Twitter has seen several rivals emerge since Elon Musk bought the social media platform, significantly including Jack Dorsey’s Mastodon, but the biggest threat yet is Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild, to the tune of 30 million signups in one day. Cue the war of words.
On Wednesday, for the first time in over a decade, Zuckerberg tweeted. It wasn’t to publicize his new text-based social media app. Instead, he posted the much-loved meme of two Spider-Man figures pointing at each other, likely a nod to his company Meta foraying into the space of open social networking with an app that looks and feels a lot like Twitter.
— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023
Shortly afterward, Musk, who floated the idea of a cage fight with Zuckerberg last month, hit back with his own assessment of why Twitter was better than Meta-owned Instagram, the app tied to Threads.
“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” the Tesla CEO tweeted on Wednesday.
Within a matter of hours following its launch, Zuckerberg posted that Threads had garnered 30 million signups—some of those who made their way to the platform were self-described renegades from Twitter, frustrated by recent glitches as well as limits for nonsubscribers.
The wide popularity of Threads gave Zuckerberg the perfect opportunity to bask in social media glory, and so the Meta CEO took Twitter’s case to Threads, in response to a user who asked an open question about whether Threads could eventually become bigger than Twitter.
“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post Wednesday. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
But Zuckerberg’s confidence didn’t go unanswered by Twitter’s bigwigs. In a post Thursday, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino indirectly jabbed back, without calling the platform out directly. “On Twitter, everyone’s voice matters,” Yaccarino wrote. “We’re often imitated—but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.”
On Twitter, everyone's voice matters.
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 6, 2023
Whether you’re here to watch history unfold, discover REAL-TIME information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others — on Twitter YOU can be real.
YOU built the Twitter community. 🙏👏 And that's irreplaceable. This…
Even if Zuckerberg and Musk don’t actually get into a real cage fight, their respective social media platforms may be metaphorically stuck in one as the battle over which social media supremacy heats up.
Twitter is now reportedly threatening to sue Meta over Threads, calling it a “copycat” app and accusing it of poaching employees and using the Musk-owned platform’s trade secrets, Semafor reported Thursday. The world’s richest man even took to Twitter to indirectly comment on such allegations, saying “competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
What makes Threads so different?
Threads debuted on Wednesday with a lot of fanfare as an “Instagram app” that ties your account to the image and video sharing platform. The timing couldn’t be better given that Twitter is weathering yet another sudden change from Musk: limited access to all except paying users, a major moment in the demise of the open internet and the idea of Twitter as its “town square.”
It’s still early, but Threads is certainly growing in popularity with millions of users joining the platform. If we compare where the Instagram sister app stands to other social media platforms that compete with Twitter like Bluesky and Mastodon, these only saw a small fraction of the downloads that the Threads app is witnessing. But let’s not forget—in the case of the other Twitter rival apps, they weren’t backed by a social media behemoth like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and users had to build their presence on it from the ground up.
The recent popularity in Twitter alternatives have come up since Elon Musk bought Twitter last October for $44 billion. He has since rolled out a slew of changes—internally, he fired half of the company’s employees and recently appointed a new CEO. Some of those changes also impacted how users interact with the platform, especially when users had to pay to get the blue verification badge used as a mark for legitimate or authentic accounts. A few days ago, Musk limited the number of posts people could see on Twitter as a “temporary emergency measure” to prevent data scraping. The result? Users of the platform were seeing error messages and couldn’t scroll through their feeds like they used to.
The fallout of Twitter has given rise to other apps vying for a slice of the social media pie, and Threads is Zuckerberg’s effort to capitalize on it. Even though it’s still early days, the Meta CEO has big ambitions for what Threads could achieve. Part of the goal with Threads is also to build out a “fediverse,” or a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe,” making the platform a decentralized network made up of distinct servers set up by users. From the Meta CEO’s assessment, Twitter failed in keeping the platform “friendly” when growing its presence, and that’s one of the things he hopes to do differently.
When reached for comment, Meta pointed Fortune to Zuckerberg’s Threads post from Thursday about hitting 30 million users.
“Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Thursday post.
