Social Media Without News and Political Content?!? Twitter and Threads Think So

Following on from our latest article – X Hides Legitimate News, Allowing Fake News to Flourish – Will X Lose its Status as the Breaking News Platform of Choice? – we focus on the comments of Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who says news and politics are “inevitably” going to make their way to Threads. But the company won’t be doing anything to “encourage” it.

In a Threads post replying to The Verge’s Alex Heath, Mosseri said the platform’s goal “isn’t to replace Twitter” after Heath questioned how the news industry would embrace 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 wrote.

Heath says the platform will require the news industry to welcome it to be a true Twitter competitor.

Meta took steps recently to reduce the amount of political content shown in its news feeds. After Canada passed a law – Bill C-18 – to force Facebook to share revenues with publishers, the company instantly pulled all news from its platform. As a result, during this summer’s wildfires, Canadian users had virtually no way of finding accurate information on Facebook. Conspiracies and propaganda, though, remained plentiful. In the US, Facebook hasn’t outright banned news—but it may as well have, as so little of it will appear in your feed.

“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 at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them,” Mosseri said.

Mosseri, who oversaw Meta’s Threads app, is inferring that news is bad for business, and Meta will do nothing to help people access it on Threads. Because, after all, as Mosseri continued: “There are more than enough amazing communities—sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc.—to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news.”

But surely politics and responsible news are the most essential topics to be given an honest platform right now. It’s a cornerstone of democracy. According to the latest stats, social media has become the primary news source online; with more than 2.4 billion internet users, nearly 64.5 percent receive breaking news from Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram instead of traditional media.

Non-edited platforms like Medium and Substack are gaining traction as people seek to follow individual voices rather than news brands. With the likes of Twitter and Threads turning their backs on politics and news, we expect more people to focus on these outlets and the multitude of other blogging platforms.  “News” content (or should we say opinion) will increase at a rate of knots; it will just be spread across a broader range of platforms. All of this is to say that the increasing complexity of social media outlets is driving the need for tools to monitor conversations. The landscape will continue to change, but we’ll be there to help.

Social360 is an advanced social media monitoring company. For more information, please get in touch with Alex Baker or Giles Brown or visit our website – www.s360group.com.