The launch of the short messaging service Threads from the Facebook group Meta in the EU seems to be only a few days away. Users from the European Union have been seeing a countdown on the Threads website since Friday, which is scheduled to expire on December 14th. The service is an alternative to Elon Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter).
Meta left out the European Union when Threads launched in July. The group justified this with legal ambiguities with regard to “new digital laws”. According to observers, this probably meant the double package of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) – and the automatic linking of user data from Instagram and Threads could potentially cause problems for Meta.
There was no official announcement of a launch – and so it remained unclear, among other things, whether Threads might have different functions in the EU than in other countries. The Wall Street Journal wrote a few days ago that, in view of the EU rules, there should also be the option of using threads only to read posts without being able to write your own posts.
Threads is considered strong competition to X
According to market researchers, since Musk bought the short message service Twitter and renamed it X, the number of users of the online platform has been falling. Several competitors see the opportunity to build on Twitter’s former importance with alternatives. Threads is considered a particularly strong candidate because the service is based on Meta’s photo and video platform Instagram with hundreds of millions of users already connected to one another.
Threads has almost 100 million active users at least once a month, said Facebook founder and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg in October. After its launch in July, Threads cracked the 100 million registration mark within a few days – but after that, user activity declined again. Zuckerberg was further convinced that Threads could become a service with a billion users in a few years. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced in October that Threads could finally become available in the EU in a few months.
