Meta’s version of Twitter, Threads, is seeing astronomical levels of growth in its early days. Mostly due to the ease in which Instagram users can sign up for the new app. 

Cybersecurity firms like Check Point are now exploring the security risks associated with the new app, and providing strategies on how users can protect themselves. 

Threads says it may collect health and fitness information, financial information, contacts, browsing history and location, all of which could be shared with advertisers.

According to Apple’s App Store, Threads can also include sensitive information such as race, sexual orientation, and religion. Android users downloading the app on the Google Play Store are able to manually toggle what personal data is shared with the app. 

Check Point points out that to mitigate the extent your data could be exposed or you are exposed to spam or threat actors, you could take the following precautions. 

• Make your Threads private. Making you visibility to ‘approved followers only’ could minimise threat actor attempts. 
• Adjust who can mention you in a post. To do this, find the ‘mention’ option, and define who can mention your account to ‘people you follow’ or ‘no one’.
• Mute or block accounts. Doing this will limit disruptive interactions on the app. 
• Hide specific words. Opening privacy settings, users can add ‘hidden words’ to limit your feed to content that will not be offensive to you. 
• Hide your ‘likes’ data. Going to privacy settings, click on ‘hide likes’ to toggle from public view. 

Threads is still in the early stages of development, and is now only available as a mobile app. The app is marketed as a positive environment for communities to grow, opposed to the more ‘wild-west’ style of discourse that happens on Twitter. 

“We’re often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated,” said Twitter’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino.

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Twitter has been in the hot seat since Elon Musk took over the company last November for issues around bots, hate speech, and perceived decline in the quality of the app. 

Threads’ content moderation strategy is yet to be ironed out, as of now Meta has not mentioned how it plans to scale content moderation to handle the influx of new users. Meta has said its existing community guidelines from Instagram apply to Threads. 

Check Point warns that bad actors on social media platforms are likely to bring with them a wave of phishing and misinformation campaigns on the novel app while it gets its moderation bearings.