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DUBAI — Instagram released its new text-sharing application, Threads, Wednesday. It's positioned to overtake a spiraling Twitter and users from the Middle East are joining, asking hard questions and chiming in on the battle of the brands.
Instagram is looking to convert its billions of users to Threads and the Middle East region is a key market for the platform.
Three countries in the Middle East and North Africa can be found in Instagram's top 20 largest national markets last year, according to the University of Oregon's report "Social Media in the Middle East 2022: A Year in Review." Turkey was Instagram's fifth largest market globally with nearly 49 million users, representing more than seven out of 10 people, according to the report.
Egypt ranked 19th with 15.4 million Instagram users and Iraq followed with 14 million users, thanks to the countries' large populations.
Threads already boasts prominent Instagram users such as beauty entrepreneur Mona Kattan and even heads of state including the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.
On the first day, the app attracted 30 million users in total, according to its parent company Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. As of early Friday, Threads had jumped to 55 million users, reported Search Engine Journal. Reality star Farhana Bodi from Netflix’s "Dubai Bling" joined Threads on its first day and has been leading a conversation about what features the new app should add.
Her nearly 67,000 followers on the two-day-old app responded, highlighting the need for instant text translation, the ability to share direct messages, editing features for sent messages and a search function, many of which Twitter has.
Threads has touted features such as AI-generated image descriptions and screen-reader support and says that it plans to add more.
The apps’ motto seems to be longer is better, as posts can reach up to 500 characters in length compared to Twitter’s 280-character limit. Users can also use photos and videos up to five minutes, more than double Twitter’s capacity of two minutes and 20 seconds.
Zuckerberg, using the handle "zuck" on Threads, already has 1.9 million followers. He posted a message yesterday stating, “We’ve got a lot of work ahead to build the app.”
The nascent stage of Threads has not given its direct competitor Twitter comfort. Owner Elon Musk has threatened to sue Meta Platforms in a letter sent to Zuckerberg by lawyer Alex Spiro, who accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who continued to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.
Arab and Middle East users are commenting on the feud between the two tech giants in full social media spirit.
Dubai-based Iranian video blogger Mohamed Beiraghdary, better known as MoVlogs on YouTube, posted a picture of a disgruntled Musk yesterday on Threads with the caption, “Elon after paying $50 billion for Twitter, and @zuck makes it for free.”
He also posted a picture of Musk and Zuckerberg ready to fight in a boxing match.
“Let’s make this fight happen,” Beirghadary wrote on Wednesday in response to the social media storm that erupted in late June after Elon Musk challenged Zuckerberg in a tweet: “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”
The 39-year-old Meta CEO, who recently picked up mixed martial arts, responded with a screenshot of 51-year-old Tesla CEO’s tweet accepting the challenge and writing, “Send me location.”
“What I understood is that Instagram is challenging Twitter, pull yourself together Abu Musk,” wrote Threads user Mohammed Kindy in an Arabic post on Thursday.
The actor and influencer with about 51,000 followers on Threads and 1 million on Instagram also posted a meme of the British comedian Mr. Bean copying the homework of a classmate. "Threads" is written over Mr. Bean’s head and "Twitter" over the head of the person whose work he’s copying.
“We’re watching the most expensive drama in the world,” added Kindy in a separate Threads post on Thursday.
