Commentary: Does Mark Zuckerberg even want Threads to replace Twitter?

Mosseri conceded that news and political content will no doubt appear on Threads, but said the company would do nothing to encourage or promote it, believing it simply isn’t worth the hassle.

This is a depressing U-turn for a company that at one point claimed to care so much about quality news that it paid trustworthy news organisations to create bespoke content for Facebook’s live platform. 

That initiative, one of several, came as a reaction to claims it had poisoned democracy by allowing misinformation to flourish. Now, it has backed away from engaging on even the most basic level. Less news means less fake news, I guess.

Similarly, as we approach a presidential election year, content about politics, or by politicians, won’t be amplified or encouraged on Threads. That might be a way to avoid being accused of political bias (even though the platform will be, anyway). The platform that used to boast it cared deeply, and energised voter turnout, has decided that Threads doesn’t need to go there.

PEOPLE MAY BE ON BOARD, BUT FOR HOW LONG?

Many people will welcome all this. It’s easy to understand why. Who wouldn’t want an end to doom-scrolling, or, worse, racist and sexist vitriol that too often surfaced in our feeds? Haven’t we suffered enough from never-ending streams of bad news? Hasn’t the noise of politics and the desperate search for attention brought an incurable division among us?

These sentiments have driven people to Threads, where the relief at escaping Twitter’s toxicity has been evident. We’re barely a week in and already analysts are talking about Threads one day generating upward of US$8 billion per year in additional revenue for Meta if it can reach a consistent 200 million monthly active users.

For that value to materialise, however, engagement will need to be high – high enough to attract the wads of advertising that power social sites. It’s no good for Threads to be an app people download and then check occasionally. It needs to provoke a muscle memory for idle thumbs, like Twitter is (or was).