Southern Colorado public safety organizations hesitant about new social platform ‘Threads’

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- Elon Musk has made multiple changes to Twitter since he bought the company for $44 billion back in October, including the introduction of paid "Twitter Blue" subscriptions, and most recently, tweet limits.

July 1, Elon Musk tweeted that "to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits." He announced that verified accounts, which include those who pay the monthly fee for Twitter Blue, were limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts, and new accounts could read 300 posts a day.

Though Musk increased the limits in the following days, multiple accounts on Twitter quickly voiced concern over the changes, including the National Weather Service (NWS) Boulder account.

Following Musk's announcement of tweet limits, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be rolling out an app to compete with Twitter called Threads.

Threads officially launched on July 6, and Zuckerberg announced Thursday morning that Threads had reached 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours. The launch set records for the most rapidly downloaded app ever.

Now, public safety groups in southern Colorado are figuring out how this new app will factor into their messaging, and right now, they're playing it slow.

Colorado Springs Fire Department (CSFD) PIO Ashley Franco said the issue of messaging is top of mind for their department, but they need to figure out what audience is on Threads and whether it will work for their department before getting on.

"Everything is so premature and we don't really know what it's going to look like in a few months and a few days," said Franco. "So of course, we're going to start talking about it. At the moment, we're going to keep on our Twitter game. We know that for us, that's what works."

The Colorado Springs Police and Pueblo Police Department also do not have any current plans to join Threads. The City of Colorado Springs says they're monitoring the app but are not ready to commit to another form of messaging.

CSFD says they encourage people to rely on Peak Alerts for emergency management, but they will continue to post on Twitter.

However, in Denver, multiple groups are starting to send out information on both platforms.

The Denver Police Department, Denver Public Schools, and South Metro Fire Department have all joined the platform in its first 24 hours.