Threads just keeps growing. Meta’s text-first social media platform, which emerged as X (formerly Twitter) quickly fell into chaos under Elon Musk, hit a new milestone this month. Threads now has more global daily active users on iOS and Android than X as of early January 2026. As the mobile platform grows, making sure you — and your friends and family — are not accidentally sharing content to Threads from Facebook and Instagram becomes crucial.

These growth figures from Similarweb reveal that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on mobile as of Jan. 7, 2026, while X had only 125 million (via TechCrunch). Meta’s official numbers are even grander. Adam Mosseri, the company’s head of Instagram, announced in August 2025 that Threads had over 400 million monthly active users.

What’s driving on this growth? Surely, Meta’s willingness to try new things and roll out new features plays a role. Threads allows users to create longer posts without a subscription, offers communities for certain topics and interests, and comes with precise filters.

Some find the Threads algorithm to be too aggressive and reactive — liking or interacting with a post or two about a trending subject can fill your feed quickly with similar content. However, it’s clear that Meta is building a new identity with Threads. It’s not just a Twitter clone, that’s for sure.

With that being said, I’d bet there’s another reason for Threads’ successes. The platform works within the Meta ecosystem, and the social giant makes it easy to cross-post content from Facebook and Instagram to Threads. Cross-posting to Threads isn’t enabled by default, but it may be too easy to do by accident, especially if the poster isn’t tech-savvy. I’ve seen countless examples of people sharing way too much on Threads, and it’s becoming a problem.

How Meta’s cross-posting feature works

As of now, your Instagram and Facebook posts shouldn’t be sent to Threads automatically. There were issues in the past causing these toggles to be enabled by default, with some users reporting cross-posting re-enabled itself after being turned off, according to a thread started by Mosseri a few years ago. Those problems seem to be behind us, and Instagram and Facebook users will need to manually enable Threads cross-posting to use the tool.

When creating a post on either platform, there’s an Also share on… setting that lets users control Threads cross-posting. There are two options: Always share posts and Share this post. They work as expected, with the former option sharing all future posts to Threads and the latter sharing just one. You can change this setting on Instagram or Facebook at any time.

There’s a separate toggle available in the More options section of the Instagram or Facebook post builder. Under the Automatic sharing section, you’ll find toggles for Threads, Instagram, and Facebook (depending on which one you’re using) that manage automatic cross-posting throughout Meta social platforms.

In other words, there are two ways to turn Threads cross-posting on in Instagram or Facebook, and both settings should be disabled by default. After it’s manually turned on, though, it may be hard for users to recognize it — or know the consequences — if they’re not an active Threads user.

People somehow keep cross-posting by accident

I know that people are posting to Threads via Facebook and Instagram by accident because I’ve seen it. Complete and unredacted names, addresses, ID badges, forms, and other types of identifying information have appeared regularly on my Threads feed. Pictures of family members, including minors, that were clearly intended for a close friends Facebook group appeared publicly on Threads — and were shared hundreds of times and liked thousands of times thereafter.

Last week, my suspicions were confirmed. At least on one occasion, this Threads poster below revealed that they shared identifying information unknowingly from another Meta platform. I’ve gone ahead and redacted the info, but you can see this poster shared a doctor’s office form with autofill suggestions for patient names on Threads. I replied, and the poster explained they “posted on [Facebook] and [Facebook] goes to Threads.”

Of course, we know that’s an oversimplification of what’s going on here. Meta’s cross-posting feature is opt-in. However, all it takes for every Facebook and/or Instagram post to cross-post to Threads is for someone to accidentally hit each of those toggles one time.

People are clearly finding a way, because it’s not uncommon to see content that should’ve been sent in a close friends group appear publicly on Threads. If the person isn’t an active user on Threads, they might not even realize they just shared their address, photos, or personal info on a public platform. Deleting content on the platform it was shared using does not delete it from the platforms it was cross-posted to, so users may think they deleted something that is still live on Threads.

What you can do to protect your personal information

Is it possible that accidental cross-posts are boosting Meta’s overall Threads userbase numbers? Potentially, though it’s certainly not clear. The bigger issue is people mistakenly sharing information that really shouldn’t be posted on the internet under the guise of “close friends” privacy.

To be clear, this is not Meta’s fault. I do think it’s too easy for a post to go from a closed-off group to the entire internet — it only takes a few taps — but users do have to enable cross-posting manually.

Still, this should be a public service announcement, especially for older crowds and those that might not be as tech literate. It’s entirely possible that your friends and family members could be accidentally sharing private content with the Threads platform at large unknowingly.

Educate your friends and family members, regardless of age, that they shouldn’t share any personal information online. It might be worth pointing out the Threads cross-posting toggle specifically as a potential mistake to avoid, because I keep seeing people post private information online, and I don’t like it.