FACEBOOK is set to launch a new app to rival Twitter, as the battle between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk heats up.
The billionaire pair pledged to a physical fight last month, but now Zuckerberg is rolling out the carpet for his new app, called Threads, which looks almost identical to Musk’s Twitter.
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The Threads app, which is currently available for pre-order on Apple’s App Store, will be linked to Instagram.
Onlookers have described screenshots of the app as a combination of Twitter’s dashboard and Instagram’s comment sections.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, describes Threads as a “text based conversation app”.
Although it appears to be the latest jab in a bubbling rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk.
Musk bought Twitter for $44billion in a controversial deal which closed in October last year.
Since then, the app has been on a whirlwind journey which has seen blue verification ticks revoked and given to paying customers, and left its 330million users divided over the new management.
Earlier this week, Musk slapped limits on how many tweets paying and non-paying Twitter users could see in a day.
And just yesterday, Twitter also announced that the popular user dashboard, TweetDeck, will go behind a paywall in 30 days time.
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The move is the latest push by Musk to get users to sign onto Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.
Meta’s Threads app will seemingly be a free service, and there will be no restrictions on how many posts a user can see.
However, folks on Twitter have already started slating the reams of data users are being asked to hand over to Meta in order to sign onto Threads.
“Thank goodness they’re so sanely run,” Musk tweeted in response.
Threads isn’t the first app that has attempted to knock Twitter off its pedestal.
Bluesky, Mastodon and Donald Trump’s Truth Social have all made a swing at it.
But Meta has the financial horsepower to be able to challenge Twitter in ways the other apps haven’t been able to.
Plus, Zuckerberg has a knack for pinching other companies ideas and making them successful in his owns apps.
For example, the short video structure of TikTok (and Vine which came before it) closely resemble Meta’s Reels, which Stories look similar to Snapchat.
The launch of Threads will test whether social media users prefer a free service with data sacrifice, or coughing up the cash to pay for more privacy.
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