Three years ago, Meta launched Threads as a Twitter alternative, staffed with a bare-bones team. Now the company says its text-based social network has 500 million users — more than Twitter ever reported when it was a public company (In 2024, Elon Musk claimed his rebrand of the service had brought in 600 million users.)
Another marker of Threads’ growth from side-project to Real Thing is that Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who had been supervising Threads, has handed control of the service to longtime Meta product guy Connor Hayes.
I caught up with Hayes at Meta’s headquarters this week to talk about Threads’ evolution, its stance on AI content…
