You will later be able to delete your Threads account w/o losing Instagram

One of the more… interesting discoveries yesterday is that there’s no way to delete your Threads account without also deleting your Instagram one.

After widespread objections to this, the company now says that it is “looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately” …

The two secrets to Threads’ overnight success

The challenge with any new social network platform is achieving critical mass – the Catch-22 problem that few will bother joining a platform until it’s already popular.

Threads found the perfect workaround to this. Essentially, if you have an Instagram account, you can open a Threads account in just a few seconds by connecting the two. That put it into the “why not?” category for many.

Additionally, Elon Musk took on the unpaid role of chief marketing officer for Threads. He’d already put a huge amount of work into making Twitter as awkward and unpleasant as possible to use, and gave Threads the final promotional push by breaking Twitter altogether for its most prolific users. He has also taken credit for assisting Meta’s technical work on the platform by making experienced Twitter engineers available for hire.

But ease of sign-up came at a cost

However, while Meta had enabled people to create a Threads account in just a few seconds, the company definitely doesn’t make it easy to delete your account!

We learned yesterday that the only way to delete your Threads account was to delete your Instagram account! The Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy confirms this: “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”

Meta is working on a fix

There was understandable outrage at this, and the company is now backtracking. Instagram head Adam Mosseri responded to the concerns by saying Meta is working on a solution.

I’ve been getting some questions about deleting your account. To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts – all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it’s just one account, but we’re looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately.