Facebook’s new social media site Threads will implement a trending topics page this week, ramping up the competition with Elon Musk’s X.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — Meta is Facebook’s parent company — announced the update Monday, confirming that the feature would be rolling out this week with plans for more countries after they get it “tuned up.”

The feature, trained on Meta’s own AI, will work much the same way it does on X. The trending topics will be featured on the search and For You pages of the site.

Meta’s AI will take into account several different signals to determine what will be featured on the trending topics pages including how posts have been published about a given topic and how many users are engaging with said posts.

While Meta said previously that it wants to “deemphasize” political discussion on Threads, which launched less than a year ago, political topics could feature prominently on the featured topics pages.

Meta says the company’s content moderation teams will make sure that no topic that violates Threads’ community guidelines will be featured on the trending topics pages.

This could signal that Meta and Threads are more open to letting controversial or divisive content on the platform.

In the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel in October, Threads announced it would be deemphasizing political discussions on the site and would limit the searchability of terms like “vaccines” or “COVID.”

While that policy drew a clear distinction between Threads and its main competitor, X, it did little to win over prospective users. While Threads continues to top the App Store leaderboards in downloads, X continues to dominate with daily active users, with 250 million to Threads’ 160 million.

• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.