Threads Download News [UPDATED]
Iris Lopez
When Meta debuted Threads, the company made it clear that the new platform was created to be a home for fun and entertainment content and not hard news and politics. But recent big news cycles around the Israel-Hamas war and Sam Altman, CEO at generative AI company OpenAI, getting ousted (and then brought back) has made it clearer to The Boston Globe and The New York Times that there is a place for news organizations on Threads.
Users repeatedly expressed surprise over the weekend that X had deteriorated as a real-time news source as much as it has. But Musk has been eliminating the safeguards that once made Twitter at least somewhat reliable as a source of news for months now.
One path would be to heed to advice of its noisiest users. Give them their trending topics, their hashtags, and their improved search features. Add lists to help users monitor the news from vetted sources. Build Tweetdeck-like functionality, or even a standalone desktop app, to let pro users monitor topics in real time.
In its public statements, Meta has seemed much more interested in the second path. Threads chief Adam Mosseri has played down the role of news in the app, though not nearly as harshly as some of his critics have suggested. After years of over-promising the industry, Meta has been gradually divorcing itself from the news business. With publishers currently shaking the company down in several countries in an effort to get Meta to pay them simply for letting users post links, Meta has many reasons not to court journalists too aggressively.
In the end, it was the users who decided what Twitter was for, inventing the hashtags and retweets and (lower-case) threads that they needed to create the product they wanted. Over the weekend, it sure feels like a lot of people decided what Threads was for, too. The question now is whether Meta will listen to them.
Twitter was by no means perfect, of course. It amplified misinformation, provided a stage for ideologues and grifters, and generally pushed public discourse further to extremes. But to a certain kind of news junkie, Twitter was indispensable. At its best, it gathered expertise around the day\u2019s biggest story and disseminated it widely. In doing so, it carved out a niche that none of its rivals were ever able to replicate.
And indeed, Threads in particular seemed to see an influx of new users. (I got hundreds of new followers after having been flat for many weeks.) \u201CReally feel like Threads is just getting better every day with more people joining,\u201D CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski noted. \u201CIt\u2019s impossible to get truly reliable news on Twitter with the current events in Israel.\u201D
Journalists posted popular threads introducing themselves to the community. The try-hard brands that once dominated the ranked feed have all faded away, at least for me. And while Threads captured only a fraction of the conversation you would have once found on Twitter, it was a serviceable place to understand the biggest beats of the weekend: Hamas\u2019 attacks; Israel\u2019s pledges of retaliation; and charged conversations about what should happen next.
Another path would be to continue in the direction of \u201CTikTok, but for text.\u201D Focus less on news and more on whatever seems to be driving engagement. Double down on the ranked feed. Add Reels. Insert more celebrity content. Invent strange and inspiring new creative tools. Cater to real-life friends and give them tools for messaging.
For all of the risks of making real-time news a pillar of Threads, it does have this singular benefit: giving the app an enduring, defensible, existential purpose. One of the hardest things to do in consumer app development is finding reasons for the user base to keep coming back every day. \u201CSee what\u2019s happening in the world\u201D turns out to be a really, really good reason. And whatever criticisms you might level at the features users are begging for \u2014 has there ever been a good trending topics tab in any app?\u2014 all of them are undeniably in the service of making Threads more engaging than it is today.
Maybe it\u2019s possible to grow Threads to a billion users while still keeping the news at a polite distance. At the moment, though, it\u2019s not clear what else might bring Meta the growth that leaning into news would bring.
LinkedIn editor-in-chief Daniel Roth says the platform is doubling down on news even as other social media platforms shift away from it. Why doesn\u2019t LinkedIn build a Tweetdeck-like pro app? (Jim Edwards / Press Gazette)
We were then two months into Elon Musk\u2019s ownership of Twitter, and it was clear that the social network I depended on the most was beginning to break. For my own sake, it felt important that something like Twitter continue to exist \u2014 a place to share news, jokes, and other short snippets of writing, in a chatty public place that gave me a sense of the daily conversation.
I\u2019ve spent the past few hours testing Threads, which will begin to land in app stores just as this newsletter goes out. Like many of the other Twitter rivals that have launched in the past few months, it\u2019s a fairly bare-bones interpretation of a text-based messaging app.
Only a few dozen people are working on Threads at the moment \u2014 a relatively small team by Meta standards. At the same time, that might be the biggest team of anyone currently working on true Twitter competitor in the United States. If the Threads team can push out new features and improvements to the user experience faster than its rivals \u2014 which feels like a low bar \u2014 it could become the one to beat. (Two obvious places to start: working embeds that let me put Those Good Threads here in the newsletter, and one-tap cross-posting from Threads to Instagram stories, with links inserted in the stories to aid in discovery.)
Meta's new Threads app has been live for less than two days, but one of the company's top executives thinks prioritizing news and political discourse on the platform "is not at all worth" the apparent business and "platform" downsides.
"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," he wrote in a response to a reporter's question about Threads replacing Twitter for news industry professionals.
"Politics and hard news are important," Mosseri continued. "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."
Meta representatives did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on whether Meta would downrank news or political content on Threads as the company has periodically done on other platforms.
For example, in Canada. new legislation would require Meta to pay money to Canadian newsrooms, something that would cost both Google and Meta an estimated $329 million Canadian dollars against billions of advertising revenue.
Top Meta executive Adam Mosseri has said that the company's new Twitter competitor Threads does not need the "negativity" of news and politics on the platform. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption
Days after the public launch of Twitter rival Threads, Meta executive Adam Mosseri was surprisingly transparent about the company's distaste for the news media: Meta will not be doing anything to encourage hard news and politics on the platform, he wrote.
But if Meta executives have their way, Threads will not be where people turn to debate policy issues, or catch up on local political developments and learn about breaking news that could affect their lives.
Instead, Threads is being offered as a text-version of Instagram, where celebrities, influencers and corporate brands dominate. Or as Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg put it, a "friendly" shelter from the noisy and chaotic world of news and politics.
Messing, who is now a research professor at New York University, has published research examining how social media shapes the public's grasp of politics and news events, and how being exposed to news on social media influences someone's likelihood to vote.
"When folks see more political content in their news feeds, they tend to become more interested in politics," Messing said. "They tend to develop more consistent policy preferences. They tend to report voting at higher rates."
Meta can turn the knobs up or down for certain kinds of content, Stamos said. For instance, Threads could de-emphasize posts that include a link to a news organization. "They'll be trying to strike the right balance between their desire to stay relevant counterbalanced with their desire to not be pulled into controversies," Stamos said.
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