The One Show's Alex Jones has jumped on the Threads bandwagon. The new social media app has been created by Facebook and Instagram owners Meta, and went live on Thursday, July 6.
It is linked to Instagram but allows users to post up to 500 characters of text and up to five minutes of video and links, as well as pictures. Revealing she was trying to navigate the new platform, Welsh presenter Alex shared that she'd been banned from Twitter.
"Just on the way home and messing about on Threads," she told her Instagram followers after hosting Thursday's episode of The One Show. "Roman Kemp is my new social guru and he said 'Come on Al just have a go,' so yeah."
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Alex then explained how she hoped things would go better on the new platform as she was banned from Twitter over a case of mistaken identity. The 46-year-old revealed that the platform thought her account belonged to disgraced far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones, who shares the same name as the Ammanford-born presenter
Alex continued: "I don't really know what I'm doing but I was banned from Twitter because they thought I was the other Alex Jones so this may go better. I can't promise consistent or good content but I'm having a go."
According to Meta, Alex is one of the 30 million people who have signed up for Threads since it went live. A description of it on the App Store, reads: "Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.
"Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favourite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world."
The launch of the platform was brought forward by 15 hours and made freely available in 100 countries but it is not yet available in the EU due to regulatory concerns. The launch comes against a backdrop of turbulence at Twitter, after it imposed tweet viewing limits at the weekend in a move Elon Musk’s social media firm partly blamed on data harvesting by companies building artificial intelligence models. For more showbiz and television stories get our newsletter here.
