Meta Platforms’ successful launch of its Twitter-like app, Threads, came together in just six months of furious work by a tiny team of engineers. But the desire within Meta’s top ranks to take on Twitter goes back years. The company’s Instagram unit even began building a text-based prototype similar to Twitter, which they referred to by a similar name, Public Threads, in 2015, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort.
That project didn’t go anywhere. In 2016, Instagram shelved the Twitter clone in favor of new visual features it was building—copying Snap rather than Twitter—the person said. Then, late last year, Meta executives became convinced the time was finally right to go after Twitter. Elon Musk had recently completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and quickly gutted more than half of the staff. News headlines about chaos at Twitter were constant, prompting major advertisers to pull back from the platform.