Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram officially unveiled Threads, an app designed as a direct rival to Twitter, launching the most serious threat yet to Elon Musk’s struggling social-media site.
On Threads, people can post text and links and reply to or repost messages from others. The app will let 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. Many of those influential accounts have been asking Instagram to make a text-based app, according to Connor Hayes, a vice president of product.
“Creators were telling us, ‘We want an alternative to what’s out there, and we don’t want to start over and have to build out a following from zero,’” Hayes said in an interview, without mentioning Twitter specifically.
