Earlier this year, Meta launched its Twitter (now X) competitor called Threads. It immediately became a hit, but then it caused quite a stir when people figured out they couldn’t delete their account without deleting Instagram, too. But it’s being sorted out now. Meta will soon introduce a separate account deletion for Threads, so you can leave it when you get bored without being forced to delete Instagram entirely.
[Related reading: Warning: Deleting Threads profile kills your Instagram account, too]
Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy officer for product, confirmed to TechCrunch that Meta is working on launching the feature, and it should be out by December 2023. Why didn’t they let you delete Threads straight away, you may wonder? Well, Protti says that it was “extremely challenging:”
“Technically, it was extremely challenging to allow deletion of a separate Threads account without also deleting your overall Instagram account out of the gate. So we paid particular attention to ensuring the user could still exercise their deletion rights, by deactivating the account to sort of hide all content, setting it to private or deleting individual threads.”
[Related reading: Threads gets chronological feed you wanted for Instagram. How ironic]
Upon launching, Threads almost immediately reached 100 million sign-ups. However, it seems that the inability to delete the account fended off new users. According to TechCrunch, the popularity has dropped over the last few months. According to Insider Intelligence’s report (via CBS), Threads is struggling to grow. It currently has 23.7 million monthly active users in the U.S., which ranks it below Reddit and Twitter.
It’s possible, though, that the separate account deletion will make more people at least try Threads out. Personally, I’m always curious about new apps. So, I would have tried it out if I were able to delete it afterward without it affecting my Instagram account. But since that’s still impossible, I never even downloaded Threads. Have you used it? Does the deletion issue stop you or you don’t really care about it?
[via TechCrunch]
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