Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says Meta doesn’t envision Threads “replacing Twitter.” In a series of candid comments, he made it clear that the app won’t go out of its way to welcome politics or news. “We will not court them as we have done in the past,” Mosseri wrote in Meta’s new application. Loading Loading something.
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Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has a message for the masses hoping Meta threads could be Twitter 2.0: Don’t hold your breath.
Mosseri made it clear that he doesn’t envision Twitter’s new competitor as a place where hard news and politics are welcome. No one will stop these conversations from happening, but the platform will not go out of its way to judge these communities.
“Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise,” he said in a series of messages. “But my view is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might generate isn’t worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or the integrity risks that come with it.”
The admission from one of Meta’s top brass is hardly surprising. Facebook has slowly retired investments in news. Congressional scrutiny following the 2016 presidential election also made it clear that social media platforms would face a significant degree of oversight. Twitter banned political ads entirely in 2019 amid uproar, a move that wasn’t reversed until CEO Elon Musk took over.
Mosseri’s comments come at a time when sign-ups for the new app are booming, even though its features remain relatively simple. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there have been 70 million signups since the app launched Thursday morning. The numbers easily place Threads as Twitter’s biggest challenger after a number of other apps have struggled to gain mainstream acceptance.
High-profile members of Congress, such as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also begun to establish a presence. Meanwhile, the political world remains anxious to see how the White House will proceed. It was a big moment when President Barack Obama joined Twitter in 2015 as @POTUS. For now, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says she, like the rest of us, remains “curious about it.”
Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz and other reporters pressed Mosseri on how any social media app can really have designs to be a “global public square” if talking about politics is discouraged.
“We’re not going to discourage or downplay news or politics, we’re just not going to court them like we’ve done in the past,” Mosseri responded. “If we’re honest, we were too quick to promise too much to the industry at Facebook in the early 2010s, and it would be a mistake to do it again…”
Meta’s current position would be a stark contrast to Twitter in its heyday, before Elon Musk. The social network actively cultivated a presence in newsrooms and on Capitol Hill. He became associated with the organization that monitored the presidential debates. Twitter employees even went to political conventions.
“The goal is not to replace Twitter,” Mosseri said. “The goal is to create a public square for Instagram communities that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter “.
