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Threads is the latest initiative from Instagram and its parent company, Meta, to battle Twitter. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri now says the Threads app isn’t intended for news and politics.
The rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has shifted from a steel cage in MMA to an online environment. Twitter first started the battle by announcing a focus on video content as an integral part of its future. In response, Meta launched the Threads app, which is deemed to be a clone of Twitter by leveraging Instagram accounts.
So far, over 80 million users have installed Threads, and the number is still growing. In comparison, Twitter has 396 million users, and Threads could soon overtake Elon Musk’s social platform.
Threads focus is not on news and politics, Instagram CEO says
Threads app is operating as a subset of Instagram under Adam Mosseri. Despite Mosseri’s experience running Facebook’s News Feed in 2016, he insists the Threads app is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and hard news.
According to Mosseri’s Threads conversation with The Verge’s Alex Heath, the scrutiny, negativity, and integrity risks that come on the heels of politics and hard news won’t be worth the “incremental engagement or revenue.” Instead, Threads focuses on entertaining communities like sports, music, fashion, beauty, and entertainment to build a vibrant platform, Mosseri said.
Of course, the Instagram CEO stated that they don’t “court” news and political content on the Threads app because they already exist on Facebook. “If we are honest, we were too quick to promise too much to the industry on Facebook in the early 2010s, and it would be a mistake to repeat that,” Mosseri said.
Facebook coverage of news and politics has always been a source of controversy for the company. Meta first dropped the “News” from the Facebook Feed name. Then, it even threatened to pull news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada over a law that required them to pay for the news content.
Threads app is certainly a big blow to Twitter, and Musk even plans to sue Meta for its similarity to their app and hiring former Twitter staff. While Mosseri clarified that their goal isn’t to replace Twitter, Instagram Threads has the potential to overthrow Twitter’s reign.
Mark Zuckerberg has already laid out his visions for having over 1 billion users on the Threads app and starting monetization on that point. When the Threads dust settles in the next few months, we can finally determine whether the excitement around it is worth it.