Is Threads winning the war with X?

In July, Meta debuted Threads—a social networking app whose launch appeared motivated by the travails of X, the platform then still known as Twitter—by giving users of Instagram, Meta’s photo and video-sharing platform, the ability to set up an account. The following week, my colleague Jon Allsop and I discussed whether Threads would be able to compete with X and how useful it might be for journalists. Four months on, Threads has arguably become a significant competitor for X, and has done so a lot faster than many people expected: the app hit thirty million sign-ups within twenty-four hours of its launch; in a conference call on October 25, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and CEO, said that it now has almost a hundred million monthly users, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history, even beyond the initial sugar rush. And there are signs of growing usefulness for journalists, too—though that’s a more complicated story.

A year after Elon Musk formalized his takeover of X, that platform’s user metrics are down across the board. Musk said earlier this year that X has somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred and thirty million monthly users; if both companies’ figures are accurate, then Threads has managed to sign up almost a fifth as many monthly users as a competitor that has been around since 2007. The turmoil at X since Musk’s acquisition has doubtless helped push users toward Threads. But that’s not the only reason for the latter’s apparent success.

Last month, Casey Newton wrote in his Platformer newsletter that the conflict between Israel and Hamas also seems to have helped tip the scales in favor of Threads. For more than a decade, Newton noted, people flocked to X whenever a global crisis struck, attracted by its mix of first-person testimony, verified journalists sharing factual reporting, and a broad range of commentary on whatever was happening. But that platform no longer exists, Newton argued; X may still offer first-person accountings of the news, but Musk’s approach to verification makes it impossible to tell what is reliable and what is not, since the blue check that used to denote a verified account can now be purchased by any user. The desire for factual reporting and commentary about the Israel-Hamas conflict, Newton added, was the latest instance of what the commentator Ezra Klein has called a series of “exodus shocks” from X, driven by Musk alienating his own user base (or parts of it, anyway).

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