Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said Wednesday that Threads will not amplify news on the platform. Users are flocking to Threads for up-to-date information about the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Ukraine war, and the 2024 election, but the platform will not be making the content any easier to find.
“We’re not anti-news,” said Mosseri in a response to a concerned user on Threads. “But, we’re also not going to amplify news on the platform. To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes.”
Mosseri reiterated that journalism is on Threads, and people can follow accounts that share news, but Wednesday’s statement is a reinforcement of Instagram’s narrative that Threads is not the place for hard news. “The goal isn’t to replace Twitter”, but to create a less angry place for conversation,” he said.
Threads did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Threads is passing on hard news just a week after X, formerly known as Twitter, removed headlines from the platform. Since Elon Musk purchased X, the news space has become ever more muddied, with NPR leaving the platform entirely after being labeled, falsely, as ‘state-affiliated media.’ This week, researchers uncovered a propaganda network of 67 accounts on X promoting misinformation about the war in Israel.
Despite a promising start for Threads with 100 million sign-ups in the first week, the platform lost 80% of its daily active users just a month later. The lack of news on the platform, a central component of X and Twitter over its lifetime, is being looked at as a potential reason for the decline.
But as Mosseri said, perhaps the goal of Threads is not to replace Twitter. By creating an ultra-brand safe – and boring – platform, Threads can steal advertiser revenue away from X, potentially squeezing out Elon Musk’s social media company.
As for X, the platform continues to make attempts at “fixing” the news portion of social media, though it is unclear if they’re doing more harm than good. Musk attempts to attract more journalists to the platform with his plan to share ad revenue with creators. That being said, there’s less and less ad revenue to go around these days at X.
So the question remains, is it better to be boring or inflammatory?