What I find curious is that Meta is super willing to use Instagram to boost their new services, but not WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is installed in more than 92% of all active smartphones where I live. You need it - that’s how customer support, lawyers, your friends, family and even workplace will communicate with you. I heard India and some European countries also have a lot of WhatsApp users. Yet Meta doesn’t abuse your WhatsApp account to create a Threads profile, for instance. Curious. I wonder how long that’s going to last.
Though if you install WhatsApp on Android, it does also silently install two Meta packages that technically claim to auto-update it and handle authentication… Except WhatsApp only updates via the Google Play Store, and authentication works without them, so I wonder what they’re truly doing running in the background.
I’ve never had a Facebook or Instagram account in my life. But I do use WhatsApp because it’s the main way most friends and family communicate (Australia).
I would not be happy if I found out I suddenly had a Threads account that my friends could follow without me even signing up, just because I use WhatsApp!
I guarantee you that’s not the reason. They did/do similar shit with Facebook and people were pissed, now anyone barely remembers or cares. People don’t care and facwbook/meta/zuck certainly doesn’t.
Things are more complicated than that. Spinning off of facebook was necessary. Just because you’ve done something once doesn’t mean you do the same thing in similar-but-not-identical situations though. It’s all calculation at the end of the day, and each equation has its own set of variables.
Similar to how we’re likely going to see a brand new form of attack, where instead of being EEE’d, he just tries to smother awareness of us and keep us small. Since he can’t actually outright eliminate us.
And because WhatsApp isn't popular throughout since there are also regions that almost exclusively use LINE or very heavily adopted Telegram. Not everyone uses Instagram but it's a popular choice for the kind of service it offers all over the world.
Meta has 100% already made shadow accounts for you across their ecosystem.
They’ve been doing that for just Facebook for at least a decade at this point, with the primary intent of tracking online activity of literally as many people as they can. Much of it is done in an “anonymous” fashion - tied to device MACs, IMEIs, source IP, etc, along with cookies that they’ve persuaded most SaaS companies to integrate on their sites (and often apps), instead of tying it directly to your PII.
Yes, but in this instance, they are allowing people to pre-follow that shadow account and then apparently you get a notification to say they have followed you promoting you to join and follow them back.
That’s a very cunning way to boost their new service quickly!
I’m relieved they’re not doing that with WhatsApp.
Yeah, all fair points. And I agree that letting early adopters concretely engage with/follow shadow accounts that “don’t exist yet” is very fucking cheeky and, imo, more than a bit disingenuous.
You keep saying the word shadow account like it’s some nefarious thing. They are following an existing Instagram account that they already follow, and will get a notification when that existing account starts using a new service.
at least you get to use whatsapp. i happen to be bound to the only two countries on the damn planet that near exclusively use facebook messenger for everything including corporate business support. i’d take whatsapp over facebook messenger any day.
of course, i’d take neither given the choice. but still.
WhatsApp is a messenger. Facebook, Instagram and Threads are social media. Also, Threads is actually by Instagram moreso than it is by Meta (although the distinction isn’t too dramatic, it’s just under the Instagram branding)
The fact that WhatsApp is so crucial may very well be the reason. In India and places in Europe, WhatsApp is literally a direct replacement of texting, which means it contains communications from practically everyone and everything - your workplace, your local government, your grocery store, your gym, your friends and family, public services, etc. And since your chats themselves are E2E encrypted, the background usage data Meta can extract from users will be too dirty and unmonetizable.
Their interactions on Facebook and Instagram - now that’s rich data. They get to know exactly where and with which people your preferences and interests lie.
Yes, in very poor countries, they subsidize the data usage for WhatsApp, so that it’s free to end users. It’s extraordinarily popular in Asia and Africa as a result.
There might be things Meta isn’t allowed to do with WhatsApp. Also the concept of account is bit blurry on WhatsApp because you basically login with your phone number and an SMS code sent to your device. This wouldn’t work as well for a service that can be used elsewhere.
They would never greenlight something based on popularity outside the US, that’s just not how Usians think. WhatsApp might as well not be popular anywhere.
If anyone was bothering to listen, we’ve discovered that big tech uses a lot of fraud to make themselves look bigger than they are, especially early on
Fuck Meta and all but this isn’t news. Meta litterally said straight up that they would be doing this before threads ever launched. If you have an instagram account then that is also your threads account. This isn’t some conspiracy it’s exactly what they told everyone they were doing. It’s no diferent than linked accounts for google services.
Yeah this Threads issue is getting into the tin foil delusional territory now. Just as you said. They literally say “well use your Instagram acccount” of you bother to read their disclaimers they literally tell you that they are literally using your Instagram account. It’s “Threads by Instagram”. When you first log in it ll import all your Instagram contacts and you cna “follow” them. And if they don’t have it yet it’ll say “you’ll follow as soon as they join threads” there is no “Shadow Threads account, because they are using the Instagram account.”.
You can definitely be against threads and Meta. I Personally am not super thrilled about it. But there is way more than enough to hate a out meta and threads without making stuff up.
I think the difference is that the Threads user count keeps getting thrown around as an indicator of its success and viability, but it’s not a great KPI.
I do think people are using this “realization” of accounts being automatically created as a conspiratorial gotcha, but it’s still important to remind people of this scenario as they evaluate their prospects.
No because they’re only doing this for Instagram users who are located in the United States. It hasn’t launched anywhere else yet.
Probably because it will be quite illegal in Europe so they probably are not going to do it for European users but it hasn’t launched there yet anyway so we don’t know.
It’s a conspiracy just in the sense that they are seemingly counting these towards their growth numbers. If they’re saying they have 20 million accounts, but they created 3/4 of them as placeholders, then no…they have 5 million accounts.
Presumably they would have created ~2 Billion Threads accounts since there are ~2B Instagram users. Even if it was just the US there are approximately ~115M Instagram account.
So no, the 70M user number would just be the number to actually try Threads.
They’re not creating a shadow account, you’re literally logging in with your instagram account.
What this post is implying, is that the user numbers are just existing instagram accounts, which doesn’t make sense because in that case they’d have 2 billion users within the first second.
You can follow/request to follow before the user has actually “created” the account, so they’re lying about which users have done that already, not about how many users they actually have.
Yes they are. There were tons of people waiting to leave Twitter for something better. What makes Threads the better alternative is they already have Instagram accounts and so does everybody they know. Joining Threads took me 30 seconds.
It seems obvious because they literally said that’s what they’re doing. They’re not trying to hide it.
If you have an Instagram account, it literally takes a single click to sign up for Threads. Your Instagram account is the same as your Threads account.
It’s like how your Gmail account is the same as your Google Drive account.
I smell an antitrust lawsuit coming up. Whether we hate Twitter or not, they could have a valid case against Meta here as this shit is anti-competitive as fuck. If Elon is smart enough, and that’s a big if, he could seize the opportunity to sue Meta over this and win. To just be able to recycle existing Instagram users gives Meta an unfair advantage over existing microblogging social media platforms.
But they aren’t forcing Threads as a default. They are associating Instagram accounts to Threads accounts, the same way Google associates GMail accounts to GDrive.
We all hate Facebook, but can we hate them for the things that they actually do, instead of inventing false reasons to hate them?
Good point, the GMail and GDrive analogy is indeed more accurate. Though I don’t believe Google is a good example as it is actually the subject of many antitrust lawsuits.
I think it would then delete any account in both Instagram and Threads.
But there’s no need to do that. If you already have Instagram and your happy with it, there’s nothing extra you need to worry about just because there’s a shadow account pre set up for you in Threads.
It’s a shady way for them to push their new service, but it’s not like they suddenly have any more info on you than they already had.
I only use instagram 1 day per year, it’s usually in July. Today was that day for using instantghram and I uploaded 4 vacation photos. My iPhone battery dropped like a rock afterwards and even plugged into a 2.1 amp tablet charger and it could barely make headway recharging my phone. I may cut loose my threads, now.
your treads account is apart of your instragram account. You can’t delete one and not the other. Meta said they already working away to delete just one
Interesting. Weren’t they working on a way to have a unified login for FB, IG, and Whatsapp at some point?
I delete the IG app periodically anyways (it’s a time suck). Haven’t put it back since Threads went live so not even sure what things are looking like anymore. I’m too old for this lol
Is this not basically what google and Microsoft do with their stuff, minus the subscribe even though they aren’t there yet bit? It’s your meta account, regardless if you’re using that particular feature?
And now Meta knows when she’s having her period, the phone number of her gynecologist, and what period products she buys… thanks to the app spying on her health and fitness, contact, and shopping data.
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