Technology
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There was no initial surge. Automatically creating shadow accounts from your list of Instagram users doesn't count as a surge.
I still haven't seen any actual evidence of this, but I'm excited to see yours, which you clearly have given how confidently you're asserting this.
I was just repeating what I've seen said here several times. Should I have taken steps to verify it before repeating it? Yes. Do I dislike and distrust Facebook enough to believe they'd do something like this without giving it a second thought? Also yes.
For the record, the numbers they reported were based on the number of Instagram users that downloaded the Threads app and took the active step of activating their account there. Threads and Instagram share accounts, so it's a very seamless process. What Meta very much did not do was take the number of Instagram accounts, which is around 1 billion, and say "We have a billion Threads signups!".
Sharing accounts and thus making it extremely easy to sign up for was, if anything, a very clever and smart move.
My understanding of it was that if anyone who had signed up followed one of their Instagram friends who hadn't signed up, then that followed friend was also included in the statistic. Was that not the case? Does Meta actually give an explanation of the metric they used?