Will Mehta be able to maintain his planned political distance in the upcoming election campaign?
Apparently, this is an issue being discussed internally after a weekend in which political news dominated the headlines.
Following President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the reelection campaign, many pointed to Biden’s initial posting of the announcement on X App as evidence of the app’s enduring importance to mass communication.
Despite reports of slow or no growth on X since Elon Musk took over the app, X remains an important source of real-time news content, and it’s also notable that Biden reposted the same announcement on the thread just two minutes after posting on X.
This is also an important point about the growing importance of Meta, a year-old Twitter replica app: The fact that the president felt the need to re-share the announcement on Threads suggests that Threads is gaining momentum, but Meta’s deliberate suppression of political content also hurts Threads in this regard.
The Information reported that Biden’s announcement garnered nearly 1 million likes on X within a day of being posted, but the thread only received 12,000 likes in the same period, which is also not surprising given that Meta says otherwise. I want to actively spread political content from accounts I don’t followWithin the app, click .
Meta tried to soften its stance somewhat by saying that it doesn’t ban users from following accounts that share political content and that such posts will still appear in the “Following” feed. But the fact that such a big political announcement received so little attention on Threads seems potentially problematic, and even ignorant in a way, since Threads’ algorithms showcase Hollywood gossip and random memes despite the fact that big, impactful events are happening in the political arena.
But this is also not a variable equation: if Meta is committed to showing less political news content, it can’t be switched off so that it can filter out specific political articles. What Meta wants to avoid are divisive political posts, and many users have reportedly told Meta that they don’t want to see such posts.
In fact, shortly after the 2021 Capitol Hill attack, in which Facebook was again accused of involvement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained::
“One of the most important pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and infighting to dictate their experience with our services.”
The Capitol storming prompted Meta’s team to consider removing politics from the app entirely, which led to its current new stance, but Threads may need to rethink this approach, especially if it wants to be successful and supplant X as the real-time platform of choice, as reflected in Biden’s announcement.
Meta claims to want Threads to be different, but its target audience is definitely X.
“We’re excited to be working with Instagram on a project that will help us grow and develop our business,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, said in a recent interview.
“I “We want to build the best platform for sharing ideas online, and that means being bigger than Twitter or X. This will take time, but we will consider ourselves a failure if we don’t get there.”
So while Meta doesn’t want Threads to replicate the anxiety and toxicity of Twitter or X, it does want to compete. And now the question is whether it can actually compete while also suppressing certain topics.
To be clear, I completely understand Mehta’s motivation for staying away from politics on Instagram and Facebook.
Facebook in particular has been used as a political scapegoat by both sides whenever results haven’t gone their way, but Zuckerberg himself has also been demonized as a ruthless capitalist hell-bent on success at all costs, as a result of political influence tactics within the app.
At the same time, news publishers around the world have been trying to effectively extort Meta for content royalties, with political pressure causing Meta to pay millions of dollars in certain territories, despite the latter’s insistence that it doesn’t need the news publishers as much as it thinks it does.
You can see why Meta wants to stay away from politics altogether, and the rise of short-form video has tipped the scales in its favor.
After TikTok demonstrated a new way to approach recommendations that didn’t rely on each user’s established social graph, Meta followed suit, and now almost all of its increased engagement on both Facebook and IG comes from Reels content with higher watch times.
Maybe you’ve been caught up in this too: Meta is gradually increasing the amount of video content you see in your stream from Pages you don’t follow in order to reel you in with clips from old TV shows, celebrity “then and now” clips, memes, and more.
In February, Meta reported that 40% of the content people see on Instagram comes from AI recommendations, and noted that AI recommendations have led to a 7% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram in the past year..
So Meta doesn’t need politics in either app and now it works well without them.
However, I would argue that the same approach cannot be applied to threads.
Again, the ideal for Meta would be to cover the big political news stories while avoiding the more divisive political debates. While this is probably impossible algorithmically, it essentially means that on a day like last Monday, Threads’ trending topics have no choice but to surface what are clearly the biggest focuses of debate.
Here’s a list of trending topics in the thread following Biden’s announcement: This will likely keep people from staying on the app and going elsewhere for the latest news.
That’s the real risk: whenever Threads’ dislike of politics becomes an “escapism” moment, people will simply go back to X to get the latest updates.
In this sense, Threads may be encouraging the use of X by failing as an alternative. And the more Threads tries to avoid the obvious, especially in the upcoming election season, the more it will stand out as a failure of its potential.
It’s interesting that Meta is currently considering this internally, because it’s clear that for Threads to be successful, it can’t shy away from more challenging content, whatever that may be.
There are rules and guidelines about what can be shared, but within those parameters, Threads may need to keep things as they are to maximize the opportunity.
