Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced it will launch a Twitter rival on Thursday.
The new platform called Threads will be linked to Instagram - also owned by Meta - and is available for pre-order.
The company described it as a “text-based conversation app... where communities come together”.
Screenshots show a dashboard that is similar in appearance to Twitter.
It is a direct challenge to Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October and whose ownership of the social media platform has been marked by a series of high-profile changes.
Last month Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Musk agreed to take each other on in a cage fight - although it is not clear how serious the proposed fight was.
The new app comes after Twitter announced TweetDeck is to become the next part of the company to be limited to users who have paid for verified status.
Tweetdeck, which allows users to manage multiple feeds and searches, will only by accessible to verified users in 30 days, according to a tweet from Twitter Support on Monday evening.
A new version of TweetDeck has been made available with the tweet giving instructions to update.
The announcement follows Musk announcing two days earlier that users were being limited to reading 600 posts a day.
He said the limit, which had been introduced “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation", had been increased to 1,000 later on Saturday.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
Verified users - who have paid for a subscription to Twitter Blue or are considered “notable" - can read up to 10,000 posts daily after initially being limited to 6,000.
