In July, Meta debuted Threads—a social networking app whose launch appeared motivated by the travails of X, the platform then still known as Twitter—by giving users of Instagram, Meta’s photo and video sharing platform, the ability to set up an account. The following week, my colleague Jon Allsop and I discussed whether Threads would be able to compete with X and how useful it might be for journalists. Four months on, Threads has arguably become a significant competitor for X, and has done so a lot faster than many people expected: the app hit thirty million sign-ups within twenty-four hours of its launch; in a conference call on October 25, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s cofounder and CEO, said that it now has almost a hundred million monthly users, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history, even beyond the initial sugar rush. And there are signs of growing usefulness for journalists, too—though that’s a more complicated story.
A year after Elon Musk formalized his takeover of X, that platform’s user metrics are down across the board. Musk said earlier this year that X has somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred and thirty million monthly users; if both companies’ figures are accurate, then Threads has managed to sign up almost a fifth as many monthly users as a competitor that has been around since 2007. The turmoil at X since Musk’s acquisition has doubtless helped push users toward Threads. But that’s not the only reason for the latter’s apparent success.
Last month, Casey Newton wrote in his Platformer newsletter that the conflict between Israel and Hamas also seems to have helped tip the scales in favor of Threads. For more than a decade, Newton noted, people flocked to X whenever a global crisis struck, attracted by its mix of first-person testimony, verified journalists sharing factual reporting, and a broad range of commentary on whatever was happening. But that platform no longer exists, Newton argued; X may still offer first-person accountings of the news, but Musk’s approach to verification makes it impossible to tell what is reliable and what is not, since the blue check that used to denote a verified account can now be purchased by any user. The desire for factual reporting and commentary about the Israel-Hamas conflict, Newton added, was the latest instance of what the commentator Ezra Klein has called a series of “exodus shocks” from X, driven by Musk alienating his own user base (or parts of it, anyway).
Although Threads has not published granular data on its growth in usership, Newton notes that he got an influx of new followers on the app after the Israel-Hamas war began. Last month, the Threads account of Reliable Sources, CNN’s media newsletter, posted asking journalists to tag themselves in the replies; more than two thousand accounts did so, including those belonging to staffers at Bloomberg, NPR, the Boston Globe, the Detroit Free Press, and other outlets. Andrew Kaczynski, a CNN reporter, noted in a post that it “feels like Threads is just getting better every day.” Although it lacked some of the same features as X when it launched, Threads has since added some similar functions, including a Web browser version, a search function, and a feature allowing users to edit their posts. The app has yet to fulfill one of the key promises that Meta made at launch: that it would “federate” with other social networks, allowing users of other platforms, such as Mastodon, to see and interact with its content. But Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive in charge of Threads, said recently that he hopes that this and other features will be added in the next few months.
When I spoke with Allsop after the launch of Threads, I said that—while the app was still so new that it was hard to get a sense of what it represented or even how it worked—it seemed to be part Twitter and part Instagram: two types of functionality, I argued, that were “in conflict with each other in some pretty fundamental ways.” I quickly tried to replicate my X network on Threads, to the extent that that was possible, but in its early days, the latter app seemed to be populated primarily by brands and Instagram-style influencers whose accounts were presumably seeded into the network, or promoted by the algorithm, as a way of jump-starting the timeline for new users. These accounts didn’t interest me, so I spent very little time on Threads. But over the next few months, I noticed more journalists showing up there—and, in much the same way as Newton, noticed a particular jump in both activity and followers after Hamas attacked Israel.
Prior to the Israel-Hamas conflict, the utility of Threads to journalists and news junkies was the subject of much debate—especially after Mosseri said, in
