Meta’s Twitter competitor Threads is launching in Australia

As Twitter struggles on multiple fronts, Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant Meta is gearing up to launch a rival app.

Tech giant Meta is preparing to launch Twitter rival – Threads – with the app appearing in the Australian app store ahead of a likely launch on Friday.

Much like Twitter, Threads is expected to allow its users to share text-based posts that can be liked, shared and commented on, according to the App Store listing.

After months of rumours and speculation, Meta’s Twitter competitor is now available for pre-order in the App Store now ahead of an expected global rollout this week. It will be linked to Instagram, which has more than 2 billion monthly active users globally, compared to about 363 million for Twitter.

“Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” the Threads App Store description reads.

“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.

“Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favourite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”

A Threads website has also been launched, with a countdown timer running until 12.01am Friday AEST. According to the Wall Street Journal, Instagram is recruiting celebrities including Oprah as well as online influencers to on-board as early app users.

Perfect timing - Instagram's Twitter rival, Threads, has appeared in the Australian app store ahead of a likely launch this Thursday pic.twitter.com/ubdgPmiIH9

— David Swan (@swan_legend) July 3, 2023

An Instagram spokesman declined to comment.

The launch comes at an opportune time for Meta and a less than ideal one for Twitter, which is grappling with numerous technical issues and a growing number of its users migrating to rival services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as Donald Trump’s microblogging platform Truth Social.

Twitter this week began restricting how many tweets its users could read, with users met with messages such as “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets”. Elon Musk then announced that unverified users could read 1,000 tweets and verified users 10,000 per day.

Mr Musk said that Twitter is wrestling with “extreme levels of data scraping” from “several hundred organisations” and “system manipulation.” He said the view limits would be essential in combating those issues.

The company this week also announced that its TweetDeck application would be soon available only to verified users.

Tech titans Zuckerberg and Musk are in a fierce business rivalry that has spilt over into a playground spat, with the two men offering to fight each other in a cage. Picture: Mandel Ngan and Alain Jocard/AFP

For months, Twitter has been trying to push its users towards Twitter Blue, its paid verification service, and has been removing blue ticks from its users who don’t pay. The company also hired a new CEO, former NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino, in a bid to repair relationships with advertisers after Mr Musk’s takeover led to an exodus.

“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” Forrester research director Mike Proulx told Reuters.

Twitter owner Elon Musk is grappling with conflicts on multiple fronts – he is in talks for a physical ‘cage match’ with Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg – and this month an Australian project management firm, Facilitate Corp, filed a $1.05m lawsuit against Twitter in a California court over alleged non-payment of bills for work done.

The claim said the fit-out group had been contracted by the company since 2015 to build out and develop its office spaces in several non-US locations to “Twitter’s satisfaction, and Twitter paid its invoices”.

But that changed after Musk purchased Twitter for $66bn in October 2022, according to Facilitate, who alleged it is owed more than $60,000 for work related to its Sydney headquarters.

“On information and belief, Twitter responded with a campaign of extreme belt-tightening that amounted to requiring nearly everyone to whom it owes money to sue,” Facilitate alleged.

“On information and belief, Twitter stopped paying rent on some of its offices and stopped paying several vendors whose services it was still using.

“Twitter also cancelled many contracts and stopped paying people to whom it owes money.”

Last month, Australia’s internet safety watchdog also threatened to fine Twitter for failing to tackle online abuse, saying Elon Musk’s takeover had coincided with a spike in “toxicity and hate”.

Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, herself a former Twitter employee, said the platform was now responsible for one-in-three complaints about online hate speech reported in Australia.

Ms Inman Grant said Twitter had 28 days to show it was serious about tackling the problem or face fines of $700,000 for everyday it missed the deadline.

Twitter’s Australia office could not be contacted for comment.