Twitter is set to face a new rival as Facebook revealed it is to launch a new app which looks very similar. It comes as Twitter owner Elon Musk introduced two controversial changes to the platform in a bid to encourage more paying customers.
Facebook’s Threads is now available for pre-order in the Apple App Store and will go live on Thursday. Musk on Saturday revealed that users were being limited to reading 600 posts a day on Twitter - unless they pay.
And he also said that TweetDeck is to become the next part of the company to be limited to users who have paid for verified status. Threads, which will be linked to Instagram, is described as a “text-based conversation app… where communities come together”.
The new app is the latest chapter in the rivalry between Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October. Last month the pair – two of the world’s most high-profile billionaires – agreed to take each other on in a cage fight in an exchange that went viral on social media.
The Tweetdeck application, which allows users to manage multiple feeds and searches, will only by accessible to verified users in 30 days, according to a tweet from Twitter Support on Monday evening. A new version of TweetDeck has been made available with the tweet giving instructions to update.
The limit to the number of posts users can access was, Musk said, introduced “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”, had been increased to 1,000 later on Saturday. The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
Verified users – who have paid for a subscription to Twitter Blue or are considered “notable” – can read up to 10,000 posts daily after initially being limited to 6,000.
