Instagram's CEO signaled its new Twitter-like feature wouldn't be a hub for politics in another sign of Meta's efforts to move away from hard news as a revenue stream.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that Instagram's team would not do anything to promote the discussion of news or politics on Threads, the Twitter-like clone that Meta launched on Wednesday. While news and politics will inevitably end up on Threads, Mosseri notes the company will not make additional efforts to promote news on the platform like it previously had with efforts such as Newsfeed. Threads has seen a massive surge of signups since Wednesday, with over 70 million new users on the platform.
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"Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise," Mosseri told The Verge's Alex Heath in a Thread post. "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 also emphasized that the end goal of Threads was not to replace Twitter but 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." The Instagram head previously oversaw Facebook's efforts to maintain a News Feed, which may affect his perspective on the matter.
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Meta has continued to try and distance itself from news content. The company announced on June 22 that it would ban news content from its platform in Canada in protest of C-18, legislation that would force Big Tech companies to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations so that they must pay them for all content published on their platforms. Meta has threatened to block news in the United States and even in California over legislation like the Journalism Preservation Bill.
Twitter's legal team sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday threatening to sue Meta over allegations that the platform had used Twitter employees to cheat and make a clone. Meta denies the claims, stating that no former Twitter employees were involved in the product's development.