Meta’s latest app Threads, a would-be rival to Twitter/X, may not want politics on its platform, but it’s coming to the app anyway — or so Threads’ search trends suggest. The app began testing its Twitter-like trending feature last month with a small group of users in the US, but is now more widely available to Threads’ user base on both the desktop web and mobile, according to users References. (Instagram says it’s still in testing, though). And by extension, it seems that the topics that Threads users talk about the most are actually political in nature.
At the time of writing, three of the top five search trends on Threads are related to President Biden’s State of the Union address, including people’s reactions to the speech itself, as well as the Republican response and the Marjorie Taylor riots Greene.
Image Credits: Thread screenshot
The fact that the SOTU address dominates Threads trends suggests that when you present users with a real-time platform, similar to Twitter, where they can fire off quick reactions as short text posts, they’re likely to use that platform to talk about whatever news of the day happens. And Thursday’s SOTU drew plenty of commentary, with Biden leaning into polarizing issues that spark debate, including abortion rights, gun control, taxes, borders and crime, among others.
Meta, however, has tried to distance itself from politics on its platforms for years after being criticized for favoring one side or the other. In 2016, the company made a change to Facebook Feed to prioritize posts from family and friends over news. In 2022, it even rebranded the News Feed as simply “Stream”. The company has also previously admitted to finding multiple disinformation campaigns linked to Russia aimed at influencing the US election.
More recently, as the US election season approaches again, Instagram announced that it would no longer “proactively” recommend political content on either Instagram or Threads, upsetting many users who came to Threads, especially for a Twitter-like experience after the acquisition of Elon Musk. the platform now called X. Creators who post about laws and legislation, elections or other political and social issues; they were not happy with this change.
But there’s one area where Threads doesn’t (yet) suppress politics, and that’s in its Trends feature.
Of course, how long Threads will allow political content to remain in the trending section before it is replaced with something apolitical is an area we intend to monitor.
Updated, 3/8/24, by Instagram statement. The company confirms that testing is underway in the US and an error caused the feature to appear by non-US users for a period of time.
