Instagram and Threads Chief Adam Mosseri posted on Threads to clarify what people perceive to be suppression of news on the platform.
I don’t believe the IG team and especially leadership are sneaky or malicious in any way but it’s difficult to see this statement and take it at face value.
Just to clarify, and this is on me for not being specific enough in my language historically, we’re not trying to avoid being a place for any news. News about sports, music, fashion, culture is something we’re actively pursuing. Political news is the topic where are looking to be more careful. Politics is already very much on threads, and that’s okay, we’re just not looking to amplify it.
He said that the kind of news (and presumably other types of discussions) they want on the platform is around sports, music, fashion, and culture. They prefer those to be driving the conversation instead of hard news or politics which are not actually banned but they want to be “more careful” about those topics, presumably, and it’s my guess, because of how sensitive and delicate they can be, not to mention Meta’s issue and history with the news media in general.
Everything in life is about politics. Sports is a battleground for political ideologies (Colin Kaepernick, anyone?), the fashion scene is a statement of political allegiances (Cate Blanchett, we see you), and music is a hotbed of political discourse (where do I even start?). As for culture, oh boy, if it’s not a political minefield then what is?
These are hot button arenas rife with debates over subjects such as race, social justice, equality, opportunity, and exploitation—topics that Meta appears to prefer to avoid. It seems Meta’s ideal platform is one of superficial harmony and feel-good aesthetics, shunning the gritty realities of societal discourse in favor of saccharine content and elaborate platitudes.
The more fundamental issue
Choosing what topics to focus on isn’t even their main problem. The Threads platform’s algorithmic approach to content curation is fundamentally flawed, prioritizing stale content and undermining the user experience.
The default ‘For You’ feed is plagued by a glaring disconnect between user expectations and delivery, as it frequently surfaces posts that are either already two days old—a virtual eon in the text-based social media space—or irrelevant and unwanted. This not only diminishes the freshness of the feed but also calls into question the platform’s understanding of ‘relevancy,’ which is intrinsically tied to the timeliness of content.
Additionally, the apparently elusive ‘Following’ feed, which offers a chronological timeline, is marred by its clunky activation and its baffling tendency to revert to the ‘For You’ feed at random. This erratic behavior disrupts the user’s control over their own social media experience, forcing them back into a loop of outdated content.
Threads says it wants to be a conversation platform but its default feed still struggles to surface timely and relevant posts. It is certainly a challenge to algorithmically deliver content that matches everyone’s unique sets of interests, and it has to be algorithmically driven if they want to ensure people don’t miss posts that they may be interested.
Clearly it’s not impossible to run a purely chronologically driven feed because Twitter did it before and Mastodon, along with its ActivityPub gang, still do, but unless you’re chronically online, the likelihood of seeing posts that are published while you’re away is small.
Without an algorithm that can be tuned to identify your interests and serve you posts that match them you’ll have to rely on other people surfacing them to you either by replying to those posts or have someone repost them and for some people that works just fine but when you run a platform with the intention of keeping as much of people’s time and attention, an algorithm is necessary.
In essence, Threads still has some ways to go to address the critical issue of recency, leaving users drowning in a sea of irrelevance. The platform’s inability to provide a consistently up-to-date and relevant feed not only frustrates users but also undermines the very purpose of social media—to connect people with what matters to them, here and now.
A text based social platform is inherently different to one that’s based on images or videos. Usage on TikTok and Instagram are driven more by entertainment value while text platforms are about what’s happening. If Meta wants Threads to be a place for conversations, let people follow their interests, not just accounts, and tune the algorithm to lean heavier on recency.
AuliaSays 