Zuckerberg uses Threads to say Twitter has missed its chance

Mark Zuckerberg has taken a swipe at Elon Musk’s Twitter as his competitor to the platform, Threads, reached 30m sign-ups less than 24 hours after launching.

The chief executive and founder of Meta used his new Threads account to say Twitter had not “nailed” its opportunity to become a mega app and implied that it had underachieved because of the amount of hostility on the microblogging platform.

Zuckerberg’s competitive move against Twitter has already resulted in Musk challenging his fellow billionaire to a cage fight, an offer that the Meta boss appears to have accepted. Appropriately, Zuckerberg said in an exchange with a mixed martial arts fighter on Threads that Twitter had not taken its chance to become a leading platform.

Replying on his new Threads account to MMA fighter Mike Davis, who had asked if Threads could become bigger than Twitter, Zuckerberg wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1bn+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

Zuckerberg indicated in another Threads exchange that Twitter had not reached its potential because it had not been a friendly experience for users.

“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success,” he wrote. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”