I don’t think that’s true. You can sign up using your Instagram account, but I don’t think it happens automatically. Instagram has 1.4B active users for reference.
It creates shadow placeholder profiles. You need to “sign up” but it’s more like activating your threads profile rather than making a new account since it uses the same account database as Instagram. When I joined, it let me follow all of the people I follow on Instagram, even though 95% of them didn’t have a threads account. Instead it put them in a pending list, automatically following them once they sign into the app and activate their profile for the first time.
The point is that all of those 100 million people did make an active decision and take active steps to create an account. I’m not sure why Meta making the sign-up process very easy is meant to be a criticism.
The criticism is more that 100 million people are willing to sign up for another Meta product.
It’s shocking that people still use their apps, given how awful the company is.
And the thing is they are reporting the number of shadow accounts they create. If I were a meta investor I would be looking for a class action right about now.
I don’t think they are because if they were the number of accounts they report would be 1.4 billion and not 100 million.