By automatically signing up Instagram users.
I don’t think that’s true. You can sign up using your Instagram account, but I don’t think it happens automatically. Instagram has 1.4B active users for reference.
It creates shadow placeholder profiles. You need to “sign up” but it’s more like activating your threads profile rather than making a new account since it uses the same account database as Instagram. When I joined, it let me follow all of the people I follow on Instagram, even though 95% of them didn’t have a threads account. Instead it put them in a pending list, automatically following them once they sign into the app and activate their profile for the first time.
The point is that all of those 100 million people did make an active decision and take active steps to create an account. I’m not sure why Meta making the sign-up process very easy is meant to be a criticism.
And the thing is they are reporting the number of shadow accounts they create. If I were a meta investor I would be looking for a class action right about now.
If it’s automatic shouldn’t the number of user be the same as the number of Instagram user?
When you login initially it offers to follow all your Instagram follows. Even if they’ve never logged in. Its creating shadow accounts for all of them.
When they login initially they find they already have a bunch of followers.
So it’s not all of Instagram. It’s just all the people who’ve tried it + all the people they tried to follow.
I’d love a citation for that.
If it only took a single one of your followers signing up for Threads to make a “shadow account” for you, I’d imagine the number of accounts would basically be the same as the number of Instagram accounts.
So you’re saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users…right?
So it’s not all of Instagram. It’s just all the people who’ve tried it + all the people they tried to follow.
It was stated in this thread there are, “1.4 billion Instagram accounts*” Not all of them are active. These so called reported sign ups are active people who are trying out Threads and likely dropping it quickly after.
At the ass end of it, Threads is using your already made Instagram account and I think to this moment, it’s still unavailable in Europe. I do not plan to use it because I lack an Insta so I can not verify when it will be available.
It’s been a bit disappointing to see how quickly reason and facts are going out the window on Kbin just because “Meta bad”. I genuinely expected a little better.
Meta can be bad, and Threads can genuinely be popular. These aren’t contradictory, and it’s been funny, if sad, to see the mental hoops people are jumping through to try to explain away how Threads clearly must be a terrible failure actually.
“had to be true, I saw it on the news” is an extremely naive take.
Journalist’s are experts in one thing. It isn’t technology or social media. Go hop on threads, there’s not half the population of the US participating FFS. It’s patently obvious. Moreover it isn’t illegal. Why wouldn’t they misreport?
Instagram has like over a billion users. They definitely aren’t automatically signing people up.
