Threads hits 100 million sign-ups within first week 

(The Hill) -- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that the company’s new social media platform Threads hit 100 million sign-ups over the weekend, within less than a week of the app’s launch. 

“Threads reached 100 million sign ups over the weekend. That’s mostly organic demand and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet. Can’t believe it’s only been 5 days!” Zuckerberg said in a post on the new platform.

Threads saw some 30 million downloads in the first few hours it was live, and it had reached 70 million by Friday, according to the Meta CEO. 

Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Threads as an alternative to Twitter, the app bought out last year by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. 

Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been fraught with controversy as he moved to make sweeping changes to the company’s organization and to certain app features, including tweaks to the user verification process that made Twitter’s recognizable blue checkmark available via a paid subscription rather than exclusive to confirmed handles. 

Musk also implemented changes to the app’s content moderation rules, placed limits on how many posts users could access in a given day and reinstated previously banned accounts.

Twitter's traffic now appears to be falling, according to a tracker from web security firm Cloudflare.

"Threads is just Instagram minus pics, which makes no sense, given that thirst pics are the main reason people use that app," Musk said over the weekend.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said after the Threads launch that "we’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated."