Culture and entertainment: Threads is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. He posted the number on his own Threads account on Thursday morning Norwegian time.

The app is activated all night before midnight on Thursday night in the UK and in a hundred other countries, including the US. But not in the EU which has strict rules for data protection.

The app is presented as a text-based version of the photo-sharing app Meta Instagram, which, according to Meta, offers “a new space for real-time updates and public conversation”.

– Let’s do it. Welcome to Threads, wrote Zuckerberg in his first message on the new service.

Users are offered microblogging in a similar way to Twitter, suggesting that Meta will challenge Twitter directly after a series of unpopular changes to Twitter since Musk took over.

The free feature allows users to organize the accounts and lists they follow into multiple lines in the same browser window, making it easier to monitor multiple accounts at once.

Among other things, as a result of the restrictions, the company has struggled with advertiser exits after Musk took over.

Each message is limited to 500 characters, Twitter is up to 280 characters long, and links, images and videos of up to five minutes can be inserted.

Two billion Instagram users can log in with their existing usernames and follow the same accounts in the new app, while new users must create an Instagram account.

Meta has informed the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, where Meta has its EU headquarters, that it has no plans to launch an offering in the EU yet.

Seemingly aiming to become a Twitter competitor to Elon Musk. Four hours after activation, 5 million users had signed up, according to Zuckerberg, Musk’s rival.

In recent days, Musk has introduced temporary limits on how many Twitter messages users can read per day, and late Monday the company announced that the Tweetdeck feature would be put behind a paywall.

In Threads there are buttons to like, share, or quote a “thread”, and it will show how many likes a message got.

However, there are concerns about user protection because Threads collects large amounts of personal information, including health information, financial contacts, search history and location data.

(© NTB)