“Not worth scrutiny, negativity or integrity risk” – Deadline
Meta launched Threads this week which is their answer to Twitter and in many ways both platforms want to host digital town squares. However, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri clears things up and says that the social network will not push topics about politics and hard news.
In recent years, Meta has made a U-turn on pushing politics and hard news on their social network, something that was pointed out is that Twitter has embraced the political talk and encourages it.
“The goal is not to replace Twitter,” Mosseri shared on Threads. “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.”
Mosseri acknowledges that politics and hard news will inevitably appear on the platform “but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”
Adam Mosseri talks about threads
Threads
Another user pointed out that if Threads wants to be a “public square” it would be counterproductive to tone down the content to which Mosseri responded: “We don’t want to discourage or downgrade news or politics, we just don’t want to curate them like we have done previously.”
Mosseri said they don’t want to repeat the mistakes Facebook made in the past by being “too quick to promise too much” to the media industry.
The Instagram boss noted that “politics and hard news are important,” but “from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might generate is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest) or integrity risk that comes with it them.”
Mosseri continued, “There are more than enough amazing communities – sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc – to create a vibrant platform without having to go into politics or hard news.”
Meta claims to have already passed 70 million users on Threads. Registration is easy as all that is needed is an Instagram account and users are automatically registered on the new platform.
Adam Mosseri talks about threads
Threads
