Meta launches Threads app that will rival Twitter – live

Among the early people posting to Threads is Eurovision, which kicked off with a post reading “Good evening Europe”. But, as the top comment points out, most of Europe can’t read that post – the app is not available in the European Union because of data privacy concerns.

Instagram has been encouraging its early adopters to post early, so that the news feed is full when people first enter it. And that seems to have worked: the feed already has posts from people including the UFC, many of which went up hours before the app actually went live.

Meta has made Threads as easy to get started with as possible. You log in with your existing account, and the design is a simple mash-up of Instagram and Twitter.

There has, perhaps, been more interest in leaving Twitter than going to an alternative, like Threads. If you want to get away from Elon Musk’s social network and delete your account while you do, here’s what you need to do.

Numerous other apps have attempted to unseat Twitter, especially since Elon Musk took over and the site became both more controversial and less reliable. But most of them have struggled.

Often, that has been at least partly the result of friction in signing up. Mastodon involves a slightly complex system of different servers that result in long display names; Bluesky is still in a limited release that means people need a signup code.

Threads – backed by the mighty infrastructure of Meta – seems to be ready to take all signups at launch. (Presumably, people might not even need to actually sign up at all, if they have an Instagram account.) That might be one of the ways it really challenges Twitter, by reducing the time and effort required to start using it.

Elon Musk’s response to the upcoming launch of Threads has mostly been to slyly criticise it. “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run,” he tweeted sarcastically in response to one report; he responded to tweets about the app’s data collection settings in an apparent attempt to make them more visible.

Twitter has gone from outrage to controversy since Elon Musk took it over late last year. And so any moment when Meta launched its competitor could have been likely to be a bad one.

But Threads is coming at a particularly bad time for Elon Musk. Key parts of the site have been breaking, and it has imposed “rate limits” that mean that its most engaged users are stopped from scrolling.

Meta has launched a very nice looking page for Threads, with swirling colours that you can move around. (Some people are saying that it’s a little too nice, and that their computer can’t handle it properly.)

It contains only two actually useful bits of information: a QR code for signing up, and a countdown. That countdown now indicates the launch is three hours away.

(Initial reports had suggested that the launch would be happening on Thursday morning US time, but it has now seemingly moved forward.)

Threads has appeared on the App Store in the US and UK. But it is not available in the European Union, and the App Store listing in that country is empty.

That is because of privacy concerns about the app, reports the Irish Independent. The country’s data protection regulator – which looks after Meta, since it is headquartered in Ireland – said that it will not be rolling out “at this point”, and the problems might be the result of confusion over the Digital Markets Act.

That seems to be because Threads imports data from Instagram. While it is a separate app, Threads is expected to be closely integrated with that other Meta app.