Extract from Cassandre Coyer’s article “Meta’s Threads: Twitter Killer, and E-Discovery Head-Scratcher”
It took OpenAI’s human-like chatbot ChatGPT two months to amass a hundred million users—a record in the social media universe. Then came Meta’s Threads, which surpassed that record in just a matter of days, making it the fastest growing platform ever and one of the most concrete competitors yet to Twitter.
The popularity of the new app is credited both to the existing base of Meta users flocking to Threads as well as the exodus from Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company last year. Threads’ rapid rate of adoption is starting to catch e-discovery professionals’ attention, many of who see a new source of relevant electronically stored information (ESI) to add to their growing list.
To be sure, Threads is certainly not the first application to mirror Twitter’s features. But platforms like Mastodon or Bluesky never grew significantly enough to widely impact e-discovery. Threads, however is a different story.
While e-discovery professionals expect the amount of business communications taking place on the app to be limited, they also note that Threads has a lot of room to grow, and dismissing it could mean missing out on key discoverable data going forward.
