Meta unveiled its long-awaited competitor to Twitter on Wednesday, which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg pitched as a “friendly” alternative to the struggling social media platform, in a move intended to draw users and revenues from Elon Musk’s company.
The app, called Threads, is a “text-based conversation app” where users are able to publish posts up to 500 characters long, and include links, photos and videos. As with Twitter, the posts can be replied to, liked or shared by others.
Threads is directly linked to Instagram, Meta’s popular photo sharing platform with more than 2bn users, and is being rolled out in more than 100 countries for iOS and Android, the company said.