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Meta’s Threads tops 100 million users in just 5 days, Zuckerberg says

In less than a week, the Twitter competitor has become one of the most downloaded social media apps in the United States

By
July 10, 2023 at 5:51 p.m. EDT
(Idrees Mohammed/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
2 min

Meta’s new text-based social network, Threads, has eclipsed 100 million users in its first five days.

That puts Threads among the most downloaded social media platforms in the United States, rivaling even TikTok, which had 102.3 million active U.S. users in May, according to data from Insider Intelligence.

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In a Monday post on Threads announcing the milestone, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the user base was “mostly organic demand” and Meta has not “turned on many promotions yet.”

But Threads has benefited from its integration with Instagram, Meta’s photo-sharing social network that had an estimated 135 million active U.S. users in May. Users are able to sign up for a Threads account by linking from their Instagram account.

Despite not being available in Europe yet because of European Union data privacy regulations, Threads has reached 100 million users faster than any other app. The speed of its growth handily beat artificial intelligence app ChatGPT, which took two months to reach that mark, according to a UBS study.

Threads still trails other social media platforms by a wide margin globally. Insider Intelligence’s May estimates peg Facebook with more than 2 billion users, Instagram at 1.4 billion and Twitter at more than 363 million.

The debut of Threads has come while Twitter’s popularity may be declining. Matthew Prince, CEO of network security firm Cloudflare, tweeted a graph showing that Twitter’s traffic ranking has gradually fallen this year.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

It has been a rocky several months for Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company, with a flurry of text-based alternatives attracting attention this year. Threads has drawn a particularly strong response from Twitter — shortly after it launched, Twitter threatened legal action against Meta.

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