Meta’s Twitter rival Threads tops China’s App Store despite Great Firewall censorship

Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, ranked fourth among social media apps in China on Apple’s iOS store this week
The Instagram and Facebook sibling app has gained traction in the country even though users must use virtual private networks to access it

Censorship in China

Dylan Butts

Published: 10:30pm, 7 Jul 2023

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Meta’s new Twitter rival, Threads, is topping China’s iOS app charts, despite Western social media apps like Instagram and Facebook being banned in the country by its “Great Firewall”, which regulates the domestic internet.

Threads, launched on Wednesday evening US time, already ranked fourth among free social media apps in Apple’s iOS store in China, and just outside the top 50 of all free apps in the country as of Friday. It sat between Chinese tech giant Tencent’s QQ Mail and Tencent Video.

The app has gained traction even though users based in China must use virtual private networks to access the platform. According to Greatfire.org, an organisation that tracks online censorship, the domain www.threads.net has been blocked in the country since Tuesday.

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While apps such as Twitter and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are downloadable on the iOS app store in China, users in the country cannot access these platform’s overseas servers to use their services.

The only government-approved way to launch a foreign social app in China is to develop a locally compliant version with strict content filters, as once attempted by professional networking platform LinkedIn in 2021 with InCareer, before it gave up on its China app earlier this year.

Audio chat app Clubhouse, which briefly became popular in China but never received official approval to operate in the country, was blocked by the Great Firewall in early 2021.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had tried to get Facebook back into China after it was banned in the country in 2009. But his efforts – which included hosting China’s then internet regulator in the Facebook headquarters in 2014 – failed to get Facebook accepted in the mainland Chinese market.

In 2019, Zuckerberg criticised Facebook rival TikTok, run by Beijing-based ByteDance, for censorship. His comments earned him the ire of the official Beijing Daily this week, casting a shadow over any plans that Meta might have in offering its products to Chinese consumers, including its virtual reality gear.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook owner Meta, has angered Chinese state media for his criticism of the government’s censorship efforts. Photo: TNS

Meta’s Threads app functions similarly to Twitter, with text-based posts that can be liked, commented on and shared. Users are able to transfer their followers and user names from Meta’s Instagram.

Meta has also announced that it is planning to make Threads interoperable with other Twitter alternatives that are based on open, decentralised social networking protocols, such as Mastodon.

This could mean that posts from Mastodon servers could be viewed on Threads and vice versa. If Meta follows through on these plans, it could complicate any efforts to comprehensively censor the platform.

While decentralised social media apps like Damus, built on the Nostr protocol, have been removed from China’s App Store for including “illegal” content, decentralised social networks have advertised themselves as censorship resistant, due to an ever-expanding network of individually run servers.

Mastodon has also been removed from app stores in China, with a number of its most popular servers blocked in the country. But the network consists of a collection of about 9,000 ever expanding individual servers, with many new and smaller servers often flying under the radar of censors.