First, you have to love the humour. Some of the first posts on Meta Platform’s Threads were terrific. “So, I guess that cage fight is on then,” said one — what do we call them? — Threader. Comedian Trevor Noah referred to this confusion, Threading (??) “If Twitter is Tweets, then Threads are Sheets, right?” “Why is everybody so nice here?” asked another. Well, to an extent: Britney Spears’ first Thread was “It’s Britney, bitch.”

Meta’s Threads is a throwback to the giddy early days of Twitter, Financial Times commentator Tim Bradshaw pointed out. “More than anything, Meta’s launch of Threads on Thursday is a nostalgia trip for those of us who signed up to Twitter in its early days. It’s an emotion that the Instagram spin-off is designed to tap, pitching itself as Twitter but without the spam, harassment, and Elon Musk.”

The arrival of a new kind of Twitter is of course filled with ironies. “The fact that so many early Twitter fans are cheering on Threads is somewhat ironic, given how long Facebook’s parent company was seen as the evil empire and Twitter the plucky little rebel,” Bradshaw writes. As one Threader pointed out, Twitter owner Elon Musk is a magician: he has managed to make Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg look like a knight in shining armour.

There is no question this is the most enthralling battle in the social media space since Musk bought Twitter for about $44-billion.

The reason is that the network effect plays against industry newcomers; the more people who are members of a network means that the network is more valuable to people who want to leverage it, which in turn, tends to increase the number of people who join the network.

And, as it happens, stay with it. Musk’s management of Twitter since he bought it has been appalling. Requests for comments from the press were met with the poop emoji. In the name of free speech, Musk opened up commentary and reduced content moderation, and the result was to allow what you might describe as grey-area racism — sometimes not so grey.  

Of course, advertisers bolted, because free speech is one thing, but having your advertising appear next to anything that remotely resembles racism would be terrible. And that, in turn, led to a huge proportion of the staff leaving or being fired. It’s been a disaster. But generally, Tweeters have stayed.

Threads’ big advantage is that it simply converts its own Instagram users into Threads users, so it’s migrating an existing audience rather than trying to create a new one. The second theoretical advantage in Threads’ favour is that because users can be linked back to their Instagram accounts, the anonymous hatred which is so common on Twitter might be reduced somewhat. Meta is certainly punting this idea, saying it hopes to create “a positive and creative venue for your ideas”.

The early signups on Threads have certainly been impressive; at the time of writing, there have been about 70 million in under two days. Twitter exerts such a pull on its faithful users, it’s often mistaken as a major medium, but in fact, it’s comparatively small. Twitter has about 250 million monthly users; Facebook has about 3 billion; YouTube has roughly 2.5 billion; and, importantly, Instagram has about a billion. Twitter is only the 14th-largest social network in the world.

It’s interesting that even Zuckerberg’s most ardent critics, who fault him for huge errors of judgement in the past, are generally flattering about Meta’s ability to execute effectively. Zuckerberg has an advantage in this battle not only by operating related properties but because his whole business model revolves around social media.

By contrast, Musk’s expertise lies more in operations and manufacturing, and possibly marketing. He has of course handed over the day-to-day running of Twitter to the new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, but he is the owner. What an extraordinary baptism of fire.

This will be a mesmerising battle — bring it on. DM