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Censorship in China
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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

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Meta launched its Twitter competitor Threads in more than 100 countries on Wednesday. Photo: dpa
Dylan Butts

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.

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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.

02:13

Twitter threatens legal action against Meta as rival Threads app goes live

Twitter threatens legal action against Meta as rival Threads app goes live

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.
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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.

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