In the Near Future, Threads Users Can Delete Their Accounts Within Instagram, Without Impacting Their Instagram Account
Meta’s text-based social media platform, Threads, made its debut in July of this year with the intention of challenging Twitter’s dominance. The app achieved millions of downloads within just five days of its launch, offering a seamless Threads account creation process for existing Instagram users. For those unfamiliar with the platform, Threads allows you to log in using your Instagram credentials. However, a notable limitation of Threads was that once you created an account, there was no way to delete it without also deleting your Instagram account. In essence, deleting a Threads account resulted in the automatic deletion of the associated Instagram account.
Recent reports suggest that this situation is poised to change, as Meta is planning to enable Threads users to delete their accounts without affecting their Instagram accounts. According to a Tech Crunch report, Meta intends to implement this change by the end of the year. Michel Protti, Meta’s Chief Privacy Officer for Product, shared this information with the publication.
Protti explained that the reason this feature was not available at Threads’ launch was because it posed an “extremely challenging” technical hurdle to allow account deletion on Threads without impacting Instagram. Consequently, the Meta team worked diligently to provide users with alternative options for exercising their deletion rights. These alternatives include deactivating the account to conceal all content, setting it to private, or deleting individual threads.
Threads shares various features with Twitter, such as a content feed divided into “For You” and “Following” sections. The “For You” feed includes posts from profiles you follow as well as recommended accounts. The “Following” section exclusively displays posts from accounts you follow in chronological order.
Additionally, Threads introduced a Translations feature, which automatically translates posts in a user’s feed into the language in which they are written and matches the language settings of the viewer. If you come across a post in a different language with translation available, you can tap the translation button at the bottom right of the post or reply to view it.
Both Threads and Twitter offer various ways for users to interact with posts, including reporting, liking, and commenting. While both apps started as text-based social media platforms, Twitter (now called X) has recently incorporated the ability for users to upload longer videos.
