Meta’s Threads, which is a social network that is debuting this week to compete with Twitter Inc., hasn’t appeared in several European app stores, despite the fact that users in the United States and the United Kingdom were given the chance to preorder the app.
As of late Tuesday, Threads was not visible in the app stores of a number of countries within the European Union, including Germany and Belgium. According to a listing that can be found on Apple Inc.’s App Store, the launch of the new service is scheduled to take place on Thursday.
According to a report that was published in Ireland’s Independent newspaper on Tuesday, which cited a representative for the country’s Data Protection Commission, the commission has stated that the service would not be rolled out in the EU for the foreseeable future. The EU’s privacy regulator has not aggressively rejected the app, but Meta hasn’t prepared for launching it across the bloc, according to the daily, which did not provide a source for its information. The publication did not say why Meta hasn’t prepared for the launch.
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A spokeswoman for Meta stated that the business is not revealing the whole list of the countries in which it plans to launch Threads, despite the fact that it is now planning to launch the feature in more than one hundred countries, with more to follow soon. Bloomberg’s efforts for comment from the DPC were not met with an immediate response from a representative of the organization.
Meta has regularly come into conflict with European regulators over the manner in which it handles user data. After privacy regulators found that the company did not effectively protect users’ personal information, they issued a record-breaking fine of €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) and gave the corporation a deadline to stop exporting users’ data to the United States. The fine was imposed in May. The corporation has stated that it intends to file an appeal against the decision made in Ireland, characterizing the ruling as “flawed” and “unjustified.”
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Meta’s Threads which hasn’t appeared will be launched through Meta’s Instagram business, will function in a manner analogous to Twitter’s text-based updates and will allow users to both share and comment on content. People who use Threads will be able to follow the same profiles on Instagram that they’ve connected with, and they’ll be able to keep the user name they’ve used there. This is part of the social media giant’s strategy to rapidly develop scale by capitalizing on its billions of users.
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