Meta’s Twitter rival Threads breaks record with 100 million users in five days

Meta Platforms’ Twitter rival Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups in five days, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest online platform to hit the milestone.

The app has been setting new records for user additions since its launch on Wednesday, with celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Kim Kardashian joining the platform seen as the first serious threat to the Elon Musk-owned microblogging app.

Twitter has responded by threatening to sue Meta over the app, alleging that the social media behemoth used its trade secrets and other confidential information.

That claim, legal experts say, could be hard to prove.

Threads shares some resemblance to Twitter, as do the numerous other social media sites that have cropped up in recent months. It allows posts that are up to 500 characters long and include links, photos and videos of up to 5 minutes.

The app’s sprint to 100 million users was much faster than the two months OpenAI-owned ChatGPT took in January, which had made it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study.

Still, Threads has some catching up to do. Twitter had nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users, according to a company statement in July last year.

The app also does not yet have a direct messaging function and lacks a desktop version that certain users, such as business organizations, rely on.

Still, analysts said the turmoil at Twitter, including recently imposed limits on the number on tweets users can see, could help Threads to garner both users and advertisers.

Currently, there are no ads on the Threads app and Zuckerberg said the company would only think about monetization once there was a clear path to 1 billion users