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Days after the public launch of Twitter rival Threads, Meta executive Adam Mosseri it was surprisingly transparent on the company’s distaste for the media: Meta will do nothing to encourage hard news and politics on the platform, he wrote.
Amid Twitter’s turmoil under Elon Musk, more than 100 million people have rushed to join Threads, making it the fastest-adopted app in history.
But if Meta executives have their way, Threads won’t be the place people go to discuss political issues, or catch up on local political developments and learn about breaking news that might affect their lives.
Instead, Threads is offered as a text version of Instagram, where celebrities, influencers and corporate brands dominate. Or as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg put it, a “friendly” refuge from the noisy and chaotic world of news and politics.
“Will this decision make society dumber?” Solomon Messing, a former research scientist at Facebook, said in an interview with NPR. “Damn, it’s really hard not to say yes.”
News is not a big money maker on social media
Messing, now a research professor at New York University, has published research examining how social media shapes public understanding of politics and news events, and how exposure to social media news influence someone’s likelihood to vote.
The conclusion was quite obvious.
“When people see more political content in their news feeds, they tend to be more interested in politics,” Messing said. “They tend to develop more consistent political preferences. They tend to report voting at higher rates.”
However, for Meta, the business case is simple: Do you want a big return on investment or ROI? Then you start pushing anything other than news and politics.
Messing adds, “What’s the ROI on being a politics-focused social network versus a celebrity-focused social network?”
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, said the company learned a long time ago that the news industry needs social media platforms more than the platforms need the news.
“Overall, the amount of engagement, and thus the amount of money the company makes from hard news, has proven to be quite small,” Stamos said.
The political drama has many fans
What keeps people scrolling so persistently that it increases ad revenue? “Interactions between individuals, family photos, influencers, things like that,” he said.
Meta can turn the knobs up or down for certain types of content, Stamos said. For example, Threads could de-emphasize posts that include a link to a news organization. “They’re going to try to strike the right balance between their desire to stay relevant against their desire to stay out of controversy,” Stamos said.
But saying Threads isn’t interested in courting political drama won’t stop it, especially with such an influx of users coming from Twitter, which is, as Stamos said, “effectively a coliseum of intellectual gladiators. People are there to see blood. on the floor.”
Many of those leaving Twitter because of Musk’s changes to the platform are left-leaning critics of Musk who tweet obsessively about news and politics. So if Threads doesn’t encourage discourse about politics, it could leave them without a real replacement social media app.
But can Meta really avoid the combative tenor of Twitter? It’s an open question, Stamos argues, but he said Threads is joking that it can be a kind of online square without the fierce political debates.
“Whatever they say publicly, it’s clear they want to displace Twitter. And to do that they have to become a very important platform for political discourse,” Stamos said.
Meta has left the emphasis on news before
In some ways, Meta’s growing distance from the news industry is nothing new.
In 2016, Facebook made major changes to its algorithm to favor friends and family posts over news articles. This decision eviscerated traffic editors once received from the social network.
On Instagram, major news organizations promote stories that can generate impressive engagement, but are typically drowned out by much lighter content showcasing vacations, weddings, and lifestyle trends.
Then there’s the Russia controversy that former Facebook employees say the company is still reeling from.
After the 2016 presidential election, US intelligence agencies discovered that Russian-linked disinformation campaigns created hot-button, divisive posts that reached many millions in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
In 2020, Russian-backed groups tried again to interfere in a presidential election by pushing conspiracy theories on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but the efforts reached a much smaller audience.
Collectively, Meta executives want Threads to be a platform that makes the most money while moving away from the kind of scrutiny that heaped on the company in the wake of the 2016 election.
But Brian Ott, a social media scholar who teaches at Missouri State University, said online platforms like Threads have a responsibility to encourage, not discourage, political debate and discussions that can influence how that people participate in their communities and vote.
Ott said Meta is trying to position Threads as an anti-Twitter, when in reality it’s essentially a clone service.
“What Meta is engaged in right now is a marketing effort to try to tell people, ‘hey, this isn’t going to be what happened last time,’ well, actually, it’s going to be what happened last time.” time”, Ott. said “It will be exactly what happened last time. Because the fundamental technology has not changed.”
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit npr.org.
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