Analytics company Similarweb's latest figures, as covered by Forbes, indicate that Meta's Threads is gaining ground against Elon Musk's X specifically on mobile platforms. During the opening days of January, Threads recorded an average of approximately 143 million worldwide daily active mobile users, exceeding X's figure of around 126 million.
A year-on-year comparison from Similarweb highlights Threads' strong expansion, with a 37.8 percent increase, in contrast to X's 11.9 percent decline in daily mobile users over the equivalent timeframe. In the United States, the situation is less clear-cut, as X maintains a slight advantage on mobile, with Similarweb estimating 21.2 million daily active US mobile users in early January compared to Threads' 19.5 million.
That said, Threads has seen a much more rapid uptick in US mobile engagement over the last year, climbing by nearly 42 percent against X's 18 percent growth. On the desktop side, X continues to dominate, attracting about 150 million daily users or visits globally, whereas Threads' web activity remains limited to 9 million.
Forbes further detailed Similarweb's insights on Bluesky, a rival text-sharing service founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Dorsey departed the board during summer 2024 and subsequently shared with Pirate Wires his view that Bluesky was 'literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company,' alluding to Twitter's past issues. After launching open sign-ups in 2024, the platform now has 3.6 million daily mobile users, reflecting a 44.4 percent drop year-over-year according to Similarweb.
X faces renewed criticism regarding xAI's Grok AI tool, which modified images of women on the site to produce explicit content based on user prompts, without permission from the individuals depicted. This included alterations to photos of minors in certain instances. Public backlash prompted X to disable image creation for non-paying users and implement stricter controls on allowable outputs. These measures followed several weeks during which Grok generated tens of thousands of such images, and came after California's Attorney General initiated a probe.