As Twitter has become a platform for news and heated political debate, rival upstart Threads is signaling it’s preparing to go in the opposite direction.
On Friday, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri addressed whether Threads would try to convince news outlets to post their content on the Meta app as they already do on Twitter. "Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads—they have on Instagram as well to some extent—but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals,” he wrote on Threads.
That’s surprising since breaking news and politics helped catapult Twitter into the major social media platform it is today. But Mosseri is indicating the same content could also drive some users away if Threads adopts the same focus.
“Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise,” he wrote in another reply. “But my take is, from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”
Mosseri added that Threads wants to create a public square—the same goal Musk had in buying Twitter. The difference is that Threads seeks to become “a less angry place for conversations” in an effort to appeal to users who never embraced Twitter.
“There are more than enough amazing communities—sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc—to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news,” he said, later adding: “We won't discourage or down-rank news or politics, we just won't court them the way we have in the past.”
Mosseri made the comments as Threads topped 70 million sign-ups in the two days since it launched, exceeding Meta’s expectations, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. That would make Threads around one-third the size of Twitter’s daily active users.
To beat Twitter, Zuckerberg himself has said Thread will try to focus on keeping things chill in an effort to appeal to users. “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands,” he wrote on launch day. “I think it's possible and will ultimately be the key to its success. That's one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
The friendly atmosphere could also make it easier for Meta to place ads on the social media platform. The big question is whether Threads can retain users over the long-term. The app has been able to quickly build its user base by making it easy for millions of Instagram users to set up an account on Threads in seconds. In the meantime, Twitter’s owner Elon Musk has taken his own shot at Threads, deriding it as a sanitized version of social media.
“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he wrote in a tweet earlier this week.