Meta’s Threads has reached 500 million monthly users, according to WIRED’s Zoë Schiffer, putting Mark Zuckerberg’s X clone roughly level with Elon Musk’s platform by that headline metric. That number sounds tidy. The useful question is messier: how many of those people are actually using Threads, and how many are Instagram tourists, bots, or accidental clicks from Meta’s promotional machinery?
On WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, Schiffer and Leah Feiger treated the milestone with appropriate suspicion. Threads is stapled to Instagram, promoted inside the main feed, and at launch carried a particularly grubby bit of platform lock-in: users could not delete a Threads account without also deleting Instagram, Schiffer said. Distribution is a hell of a drug.
Meta built Threads after Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, betting that disaffected users wanted somewhere else to post short text updates. Schiffer said the app initially felt over-moderated and oddly corporate, closer to LinkedIn than old Twitter. Feiger and Schiffer argued it now appears to have found a different shape, with niche cultural communities and customer-service complaints that feel more Reddit-adjacent than breaking-news obsessed.
That distinction matters for the X comparison. Schiffer said Meta tried early on to attract sports journalists and breaking-news users, but did not want Threads to become a news-first or politics-first platform. The result, by their read, is growth without a clean migration of finance Twitter, sports Twitter, or politics Twitter. Meta may have a large social app here. It has not necessarily rebuilt Twitter.
The Trump phone becomes a physical object
The hosts also turned to the Trump-branded T1 phone, a $499 device announced last summer at Trump Tower by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as part of Trump Mobile. Feiger said the phone was pitched with $100 deposits and an estimated 600,000 people putting money down, a figure she said deserves skepticism.
The product missed its planned August 2025 launch, slipped to winter, then slipped again. Trump Mobile later said orders would begin shipping soon, and Feiger said some units have now started arriving.
Based on early accounts discussed by Schiffer, the T1 appears to be a basic Android handset with Truth Social installed. Feiger described a gold-colored phone with an American flag at the bottom. Schiffer said the device comes with a blue default background and few extra features.
The more durable business may be Trump Mobile rather than the handset. Feiger said the service is built on T-Mobile’s network. She also said the company has not clearly specified where or how the phones are made, and that it dropped an earlier claim that the device would be made in America. A phone is less forgiving than a token or a betting-market partnership. Customers eventually expect the thing in the box to work.
Maine’s Senate race turns ugly
The political segment focused on Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine running against longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins. WIRED described the race as a fast-moving crisis and said Platner was stepping down after a run of controversies. In the recorded discussion, Feiger said Platner, as of that taping, was facing calls from Democrats to end his campaign.
Politico reported Monday that a woman who had an on-and-off relationship with Platner alleged that in 2021 he entered her Maine home while intoxicated and forced her to have sex despite repeated objections. Platner has denied the allegation, according to Feiger.
Feiger said the woman went on the record even though she did not want to make her identity public, because previous controversies had not ended Platner’s campaign. Feiger also referred to numerous Reddit posts by Platner between 2009 and 2021 as part of the broader controversy surrounding him.
The three stories share a theme: user counts, preorder claims, and campaign survival narratives all look cleaner in the pitch than in the details. The details are doing the damage.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
