Facebook's parent company Meta announced on Thursday Australian time that Threads was meant to share text updates and join public conversations.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told Alex Heath of The Verge in a conversation on Threads that the new app would not be doing anything to encourage posts on politics and hard news.
In a post, he wrote: "Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.
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On Friday, more than 30 million people were reported to have joined Threads. As iTWire pointed out, the mob who signed up to Mark Zuckerberg's latest toy, appeared to be unaffected by the fact that one _had_ to have an Instagram account to join. Additionally, nobody can leave Threads without also losing their Instagram account.
"The goal isn't to replace Twitter," Mosseri told Heath. "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.
"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 later said while Threads would not “discourage or down-rank news or politics”, it would not "court" them, something which Facebook has done in the past.
Meta's Twitter clone launches, immediately censors anyone with unapproved thoughts https://t.co/oex9gmux4K
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) July 6, 2023
The reaction on Twitter to Mosseri's post was uniformly critical. Matthew Cushman, an adjunct math professor at Hunter College in New York City, said: "This attitude explains a lot about Facebook and why it's so utterly bland now.
"Their draconian moderation policy discourages sharing anything but insipid nonsense. Politics is important actually. It's misinformation that is bad, and sorting it out takes effort (therefore money)."
Well-known American journalist Glenn Greenwald said: "Corporate media's relentless censorship demands have made Big Tech companies conclude that it's not worth the misery, cost and accusations to host news reporting political discourse online. They destroyed one of the primary promises of the early Internet."
