Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that his Twitter copycat Instagram Threads has reached 175 million monthly active users — making another case for the platform to overtake Elon Musk’s X (formally Twitter).
X’s value has plummeted since Musk took over; meanwhile, Zuckerberg is building Threads’ up. Musk, of course, claims that X is increasingly popular, with 550 million monthly active users, but analysts say it’s lagging behind social media rivals. By March 2024, daily active users on X were down 23% from the time Musk acquired it in late 2022. And in April, Threads overtook the site in terms of that metric: Threads had 28 million daily active users; X had 22 million.
Since its debut last year, Meta’s Threads has branded itself as a “less angry” alternative to X. Zuckerberg has also positioned Threads as a better kind of social media for society by making it part of an interconnected digital ecosystem called the “fediverse.”
Its user base also now includes Taylor Swift.
“It’s obviously nice to have Taylor Swift,” Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox said during an interview at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in May. “Because [Threads is] connected to the Instagram accounts … it’s not hard for Taylor Swift to immediately light up her fan base and audience and [connect] to everything that she’s built up on Instagram.”