Will Threads launch in the EU on December 14? German train drivers are on strike: only one in five long-distance trains is running

The launch of the short messaging service Threads from the Facebook group Meta in the European Union (EU) appears to be imminent. EU users have been seeing a countdown on the Threads website since Friday, ending on December 14.

Meta left out the European Union when Threads launched in July. The service is an alternative to Elon Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter). The group justified this with legal ambiguities regarding “new digital laws”. According to observers, this likely meant the double whammy of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) – and the automatic linking of user data from Instagram and Threads could potentially cause problems for Meta.

There was no official announcement of a launch – and so it remained unclear, among other things, whether Threads might have different features in the EU than in other countries. The Wall Street Journal wrote a few days ago that, given EU rules, there should also be the option to use threads only to read messages without being able to write messages yourself.

100 million active users

According to market researchers, the number of users of the online platform has declined since Musk bought the short-message service Twitter and renamed it X. Several competitors see the opportunity to build on Twitter’s former importance with alternatives. Threads is considered a particularly strong candidate because the service is based on Meta’s photo and video platform Instagram, where hundreds of millions of users are already connected.

Threads has nearly 100 million active users at least once a month, Facebook founder and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said in October. After launching in July, Threads broke the 100 million registration mark within a few days, but then user activity dropped again. Zuckerberg was further convinced that Threads could become a service with a billion users within a few years. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced in October that Threads could eventually be available in the EU within a few months. (sda/dpa)