The Emergence of Threads: The Birth of a New Social Network
Peixian Zhang, Yupeng He, Ehsan-Ul Haq, Jiahui He, and Gareth Tyson

TL;DR
This study explores the emergence of Threads, a new social media platform from Meta, analyzing user behavior, content preferences, and engagement patterns in comparison to Instagram, revealing distinct topical interests and posting habits.
Contribution
It provides an initial comparative analysis of user behavior and content trends between Threads and Instagram, highlighting platform-specific engagement and topic preferences.
Findings
Threads engages more with political and AI topics.
User activity patterns are similar on weekends across both platforms.
Users tend to post about topics that receive more likes.
Abstract
Threads, a new microblogging platform from Meta, was launched in July 2023. In contrast to prior new platforms, Threads was borne out of an existing parent platform, Instagram, for which all users must already possess an account. This offers a unique opportunity to study platform evolution, to understand how one existing platform can support the "birth" of another. With this in mind, this paper provides an initial exploration of Threads, contrasting it with its parent, Instagram. We compare user behaviour within and across the two social media platforms, focusing on posting frequency, content preferences, and engagement patterns. Utilising a temporal analysis framework, we identify consistent daily posting trends on the parent platform and uncover contrasting behaviours when comparing intra-platform and cross-platform activities. Our findings reveal that Threads engages more with…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Media and Politics · Digital Games and Media
