MrBeast becomes first person to reach 1 million followers on new 'Twitter killer' app Threads

Someone on thed new social media app Threads has already reached a million followers, and if you've given the headline even so much as a cursory glance you'll know it's MrBeast.

The popular YouTuber - real name Jimmy Donaldson - has gained a massive following online thanks to his videos which pull major stunts and feature big prize giveaways for participants.

His online presence is worth so much that someone once tried to pay him a billion dollars to obtain his YouTube channel, so it's no surprise that he'd be an early adopter of an app like Threads and make it big on there.

One of the features of Threads - owned and run by Meta - is that it's linked to your Instagram profile, so if you join the new platform you can essentially import your followers along with you and they'll be signed up to you if they followed you before.

Since MrBeast is so popular it's not really astonishing that he's the first person on the new site to reach a million followers, though it is something of a testament to how many people are giving Threads a go.

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Launched by Mark Zuckerberg's parent company Meta, Threads has been touted as a 'Twitter killer' though the iconic social media site looks like it needs little outside help with that at the moment.

Twitter has been in all kinds of trouble ever since Elon Musk took over the platform, fired a whole bunch of people who made the social media site work and then wondered why things stopped working as well.

Various changes to the platform have also gone down quite poorly, like scrapping the verification system and replacing it with the $8 Twitter Blue only to get a hard lesson in why a verification system might be useful.

Recent drama over Musk announcing users would be temporarily 'rate limited' on have the number of tweets they could see a day added yet another straw to the camel's already overburdened back.

While Twitter is still incredibly popular and any possible demise of the site has been greatly exaggerated there are many users who feel as though it's become much worse in recent months and have been looking for somewhere else to go.

Instagram

Meta will be hoping they settle on Threads, which launched today (6 July), as the place everyone can quit Twitter for.

Other sites such as Mastodon have tried to set themselves up as the place the Twitter user base can migrate to while fleeing Musk's crumbling kingdom but nothing has really taken off in a big enough way to truly topple Twitter yet.

Millions of people have already signed up to Threads and Zuckerberg has made a bit of a dig at Musk in the process, saying the internet could do with a 'public conversations app' with over a billion people on it.

Twitter hasn't quite managed to get that popular and it sounds like Threads has got the intent to overtake and supplant the big blue bird.