What Threads entry means for journalism
This photo illustration created in Washington, DC, on July 5, 2023, shows the logo for Threads, an Instagram app, reflected in the Twitter logo. Facebook owner Meta's new Threads app, meant to compete with Twitter, was available for pre-order on mobile app stores on iPhone and Android operating systems on July 5, 2023.
This week, Facebook’s parent company Meta officially launched ‘Threads’, a new social media platform and main competitor to Twitter. This comes hot on the heels of Twitter’s latest changes and challenges regarding a temporary limit on how much content users can read per day.
According to Meta, Threads is a new app built by the Instagram team which allows users to share text updates and join public conversations. Users are required to join Threads using their Instagram accounts and will put up posts of up to 500 characters, share photos, videos and links to their friends, including those they follow on Instagram.
Leveraging on the Instagram user experience, the vision with this new platform is to “take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas”.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads attracted more than five million sign-ups in the first four hours since launch and surpassed the 30 million signups mark in the first 24 hours.
Twitter has already responded with a letter to Mr Zuckerberg, threatening legal action over what it claims is “systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property”.
How this pans out – and if Threads will finally oust Twitter in the microblogging space is anyone’s guess. What I am more interested in is what this means for the media and its ultimate impact on the industry.
The launch of Threads adds to an increasing variety of social media platforms jostling for the attention of users. Just when we thought we had figured out Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, TikTok was springed on us and is now one of the fastest growing social media apps for accessing news by the Generation Z. With this new launch, it is only a matter of time before Threads becomes a force to reckon with.
Massive growth
In the recently launched Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, audiences – especially the younger ones – are preferring to access news through ‘side-door’ routes such as social media, with Facebook remaining one of the most-used social media networks for accessing news, and TikTok showing massive growth.
While the impact of Facebook on news is waning — according to this year’s Digital News Report — the changing audience habits and the emergence of a new social network nearly every year clearly signals that the wars between media and Big Tech are far from over.
What this means then is that while media struggles to wean itself off the social-media based business model, the media also needs to figure out a way to co-exist with social media platforms and hopefully find a way to exist in spite of social media.
Even as many predict the death of media, I find comfort in the fact that before social media, there was journalism. The form and shape of media may change, but journalism will always stand the test of time- no matter how uncertain those times become.
Dr Chege is a media and technology researcher.
