Strange threadfellows

It sounds like the start of a joke – why did the world’s richest man challenge the world’s richest millennial to a cage fight?

Though not much of a – sorry – punchline, the actual answer is Threads, the microblogging platform released to the public today by the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram. And according to Elon Musk, the app is a Twitter clone.

📱 Pulling the threads… Much like Twitter, Threads allows users to like, comment, repost, and share posts called – believe it or not – “threads.”

• Any of Instagram’s roughly 170 million US- and UK-based users with an iOS or Android phone can sign up for Threads using their existing Instagram username.
• Threads is not currently available in the EU, and there’s no set date for an EU launch. This decision, according to internal sources, is due to Meta’s desire to share private data related to a user’s health, finances, location, and browsing history across different platforms like Facebook and Instagram – and the legal basis the company had claimed for processing Facebook users’ personal data (performance of a contract) was found unlawful at the start of this year.

🐦 Zoom out: Meanwhile in Twitterland, CEO Elon Musk announced over the weekend that user accounts would be capped at viewing a certain amount of tweets per day based on their verification status, in order to curtail bots from scraping content on the platform.