Meta Aims to Prevent Deleted Threads Accounts from Deleting Instagram Profiles

If you registered for a Threads account out of curiosity about Meta’s Twitter competitor, deleting your Threads profile may not be the best option if you are not satisfied or wish to start anew. According to The Verge, deleting your Threads profile will also result in the deletion of your entire Instagram account. When creating a Threads account, you have the option to use your Instagram credentials to sign up and transfer your profile and circles from the photo-sharing app. However, this choice links your accounts on both platforms permanently.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a post on Threads that Meta is aware of the issue and is currently looking into a way for you to delete your Threads account individually. The company is also working on features that are still missing from the app, including the next tab, hashtags, versatile support, and messaging. For now, you can disable your Threads account to hide your profile and content. You can also set your profile to private or simply delete individual threads. Note that you can also sign up for a Threads account with an email or phone number that isn’t linked to your Instagram account, so you can keep the two platforms completely separate.

Meta couldn’t have launched Threads at a better time. Twitter recently made some changes that frustrated even the most avid users. First, it prevented people who aren’t signed in from seeing tweets — though it quietly backed out of requiring users to sign in — and then imposed a hard limit on how many posts users could see per day. About 10 million users signed up for Threads in its first seven hours, and the first morning after it became available, the app already had 30 million users. Shortly after Threads was released, Twitter threatened to sue Meta, accusing it of poaching former employees and misusing trade secrets and intellectual property rights. Elon Musk responded to a tweet about a potential lawsuit: “Competition is OK, cheating is not.”