New Threads social media platform halted operations in Europe

The newly introduced Instagram application, Threads, will suffer a delay in its Europe launch due to privacy concerns from the European Union.

An Irish entity reported the development and stated that the watchdog had contacted the social media giant, META, about the new product and confirmed the release would not go smoothly in the European region.

 

META’s Threads will be the Twitter counterpart.

 

Threads is the newest social media platform that allows Instagram users to discuss every trending topic. This app is the product that META introduces as their answer to social media giant Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg released the new product earlier this month.

Based on the announcement, the app will enable its user to follow the same accounts they already follow on Instagram. The app is already offered in Play Store and Apple App Store, although some regions can yet download the product.

The App Privacy section on Apple’s App Store explains that the new application will collect a wide range of user data. Some of the confirmed data that Threads will collect includes Purchases, Financial Information, Location, Health, and Fitness, Contact Information, Search History, User Content, Browsing History Data Usage, Diagnostics, Identifiers, and Sensitive Information.

Experts believe that Meta is taking a slow and cautious approach to bringing the social media platform to Europe since the European Union might have yet entirely block Threads from launching.

Other researchers also noted that Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, had suffered the same treatment as Threads before its launch in European countries.

This development overlaps with a series of policy changes in Twitter, which started blocking unregistered users from being able to use the Twitter website on the web and enforced temporary rate caps for logged-in users to restrict the number of posts they could see daily.

On the other hand, Elon Musk said that his team prioritises their mission of detecting and eliminating bots and malicious entities from their platform that infested Twitter for years. They have yet to address the emergence of the new social media platform.