Why Meta Is Launching a Twitter Rival Called Threads

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter Inc. last year, the microblogging site has faced technical glitches, content moderation problems and controversy over its new owner’s declared “free speech absolutism.” Enter rival billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta Platforms Inc. has seized the moment to launch a competing service, Threads, with the scale, financial firepower and pre-existing user base to potentially threaten Twitter’s dominance.

Threads is a “text-based conversation app” that’s widely seen as an alternative to Twitter. Like Twitter, the app allows users to write and share real-time text updates among groups of followers, who can like and reply to them and share them with their own followers. It even borrows the name from its rival: Threads are another word for a series of connected tweets from one account. The app lets users port over their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram, Meta’s photo and video-sharing app that counts major brands, celebrities and creators among its more than 2 billion users.