The head of Instagram insisted in a post on Friday that the platform’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, is not just a Twitter dupe.
Instead, he envisions Threads will provide a “less angry” alternative where hard news and politics will be less dominant.
“The goal isn’t to replace Twitter,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram—and by extension, Threads—wrote on the new platform. “The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram 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.”
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Mosseri’s post was in reply to The Verge editor Alex Heath, who had posted a question about how Meta, which has deprioritized news on its platforms, can succeed in supplanting Twitter without courting the media.
“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,” Mosseri said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that more than 70 million users had signed up for Threads by Friday morning, less than two days after the app went live. Meanwhile, Twitter—which is recovering from backlash to recent changes by owner Elon Musk—has responded by threatening to sue Meta for ripping it off.
But in Mosseri’s view, Threads isn’t trying to dethrone Twitter (design similarities aside). Instead, its goal is to lure a user base that isn’t interested in politics or “hard news.”
“Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise,” Mosseri replied after Heath pressed him on his reason for deprioritizing news on Threads. “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’s comments come as Meta is mired in a battle with Canadian politicians who want the company to compensate news publishers for news shared on its platforms. Meta responded by saying it would halt Canadian users from accessing news articles on its sites.
Mosseri suggested that there is a wide range of users with interests outside of news and politics that Threads can appeal to, including sports, music, and entertainment.
“We won’t discourage or down-rank news or politics, we just won’t court them the way we have in the past,” Mosseri wrote in another reply to Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. “If we are honest, we were too quick to promise too much to the industry on Facebook in the early 2010s, and it would be a mistake to repeat that…”
