Twitter vs. Threads

Could Instagram Threads contribute towards being another factor of demographics destruction?

Pic Credits: PEOPLE MAGAZINE

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a news flash: Meta launched an Instagram powered microblogging application called ‘Threads’ on the 5th of July, 2023.

Threads has managed to reach over 60 million users within 48 hours, thus, offering a stiff competition to its rival, Twitter.

If you’ve read the up and latest news, you’d know that Twitter is threatening Meta with a lawsuit for expropriating Twitter’s intellectual property rights as stated by The Guardian.

Besides the obvious tech rivalry that has taken the world by storm, what are the more modern, generational connotations of Twitter vs. Threads?

According to Statista, Twitter’s popularity is concentrated between the demographic of 25–34 years with the age group 34–49 bagging the second most concentrated demographics amongst Twitter audience.

Threads, on the other hand, has its users being transferred from Instagram. The audience are basically Instagram users whose demographics span from the ages 18 to 24.

With the above facts and statistics, it is evident that the point of distinction between Threads and Twitter is the demographic cohort. While the centric issue revolves around overlapping features and app layouts, the adversaries indeed hold deeper implications in generation culture.

For example, if you’re a Twitter user, you’re most likely to be a millennial and if you’re a millennial, there’s a high chance that you might recognise Threads to be nothing but a Twitter clone and call it out to be a ‘copycat’.

However, if you’re a GenZ, you most probably imported your data and followers to Threads within the first twenty four hours since its launch. There’s also a high probability that your Twitter account has received little to nil screen time of yours, since it’s old anol, while you’re simultaneously posting and scrolling through Threads 24/7.

As her first Threads post, Elizabeth Gillies posted, “Does this mean I’m hip?”, which only points towards the notion that a Threads user is a trendjacker, and therefore, undeniably hip and cool. But the fact that it is a rhetorical question for validation proves the generational difference wherein millennials join Threads only because of the pressure of trendjacking, because it’s the new “hip”, as conjectured by GenZ. It is almost sarcastic.

So perhaps this rivalry of ‘Twitter vs. Threads’ is more of ‘Twitter and Threads vs. Humans’ as their war plays an incontestable role in further segmenting the generations, and consequentially precipitating demographic destruction due to the ‘new vs old’ challenge that it offers to millennials and zoomers. The two competitors are almost responsible for pronouncing demographic cohort differences and subtly forming two armies: Twitter users and Threads users; while, we, as the generations in question, casually neglect our reality of once again falling prey to technology, not to mention, being enslaved by it.

©️ 2023 Shruti Iyer

If you like this article, make sure to check out a few other blogs and poems of mine :)