Users who attempted to remove their accounts on Threads, a new app from Meta, discovered that they were unable to do so unless they delete their Instagram accounts too.
According to a post from Mark Zuckerberg on the app, Threads, Meta’s much awaited take on Twitter, premiered on July 6 and attracted 10 million sign-ups in the first seven hours.
Elon Musk announced temporary implementation of “rate limits,” which placed a limit on the number of posts users could read. Musk cited “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation” from AI companies as the reason for the measures, which have increased buzz around the new platform.
The internet’s biggest and most entertaining experiment of the day so far has been Threads’ launch; users are writing on the app to learn how it functions, and many have expressed the opinion that users will start to switch from Twitter to its gleaming new competition.
However, according to the Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy and a Help Centre page, some other users have reported that after using the app for a few hours and deciding they didn’t like it, they wanted to delete their accounts. However, they discovered that they couldn’t delete Threads without deleting their Instagram accounts.
Users may erase specific postings or temporarily deactivate their accounts, which prevents other users from seeing their posts until they decide to reactivate their accounts, according to a disclaimer in the app’s help centre. However, users have to delete their Instagram account in order to completely erase the profile and data associated with it.
According to the app’s Supplemental Privacy Policy, “Your Threads profile is part of your Instagram account, and may be deleted at any time by deleting your Instagram account.”
Some users who sought to remove their Threads accounts turned to Twitter, a competitor, to voice their displeasure with the Meta policy.
“We can’t delete our threads account without deleting our ig?? they knew ppl would instantly hate it so they made it a saw trap,” one user remarked in a tweet that has 1.1 million views and 25,000 likes.
we can’t delete our threads account without deleting our ig?? they knew ppl would instantly hate it so they made it a saw trap
— laura ???? (@ecto_fun) July 6, 2023
Other users have complained that they feel “trapped” or “stuck” in their Threads accounts, and one user who claimed she decided to deactivate her account rather than delete it advised others not to download the application at all.
Twitter threatens legal action over Meta s ‘copycat’ Threads
