Today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces the expansion of Threads into additional European countries.
Today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the expansion of Threads to more European countries, extending a warm welcome. Threads initially launched in July across 100 countries, excluding the European Union. The delay in EU launch, including major markets like Germany and France, resulted from stringent privacy laws. In response to Brussels’ regulatory concerns, Meta allows EU users to browse Threads without a profile. Interaction or posting, however, still requires an Instagram account login.
Critics accuse Meta, particularly Threads, of weak user privacy protection due to extensive data collection. Threads uses various Instagram user data, contributing to its rapid acquisition of 100 million users within five days of its July 5th debut. Despite this, user engagement dropped by 79% from a peak of 49.3 million daily active users on July 7th to 10.3 million on August 7th as the initial excitement waned.
Despite this setback, as Threads underwent further development and users shifted away from X (formerly Twitter), engagement rebounded. By October, daily active users had increased to 33 million, according to data from Apptopia.
The launch of Threads in the EU is expected to significantly enhance its user base, coinciding with challenges faced by X in retaining both users and advertisers. Although Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri emphasized that Threads is not intended to replace Twitter but rather create a ‘public square’ for more positive conversations, Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter and rebranded it as X, threatened legal action against Meta, alleging the misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property following the launch of Threads.
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