“Threads isn’t for news and politics”, says CEO of Instagram

The newest effort by Instagram and its parent company, Meta, to compete with Twitter is called Threads. The Threads app is not meant to be used for news and politics, according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s conflict now takes place online instead of in an MMA steel cage. Twitter kicked off the conflict by declaring that it would prioritize video content as a key component of its future. Meta responded by releasing the Threads app, which is thought to be a Twitter clone that uses Instagram profiles.

Threads have been downloaded by more over 80 million people to far, and that number is continually rising. The social media platform owned by Elon Musk, Twitter, has 396 million members, while Threads may soon surpass it.

Thread isn’t a place for politics and news

According to the Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri, the Threads app functions as a subset of Instagram and does not focus on news and politics. Mosseri says that the Threads app “is not going to do anything to encourage” politics and hard news despite his prior experience managing Facebook’s News Feed in 2016.

The scrutiny, hostility, and integrity issues that follow politics and hard news won’t be worth the “incremental engagement or revenue,” according to Mosseri’s Threads interview with Alex Heath of The Verge. Instead, to create a dynamic platform, Threads concentrates on interesting communities like sports, music, fashion, beauty, and entertainment, according to Mosseri.

Of course, the Instagram CEO said that since Facebook already hosts news and political content, they don’t “court” it for the Threads app. In the early 2010s, on Facebook, “if we are honest, we were too quick to promise too much to the industry, and it would be a mistake to repeat that,” Mosseri added.

Politics and news coverage on Facebook has long been a source of contention for the corporation. The Facebook Feed name was initially changed without the word “News”. Then, in response to a law that compelled it to charge for the news material, it even threatened to remove news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada.

The Threads app is undoubtedly a major setback for Twitter, and Musk even threatens to sue Meta for copying their software and using former Twitter employees. Instagram Threads can challenge Twitter’s dominance, despite Mosseri’s clarification that this is not their intention.

Having more than 1 billion users and then beginning to monetize the Threads app are goals that Mark Zuckerberg has already stated. We’ll finally know whether the anticipation for Threads was worthwhile when the dust settles in the upcoming months.