Adam Mosseri speaks onstage at the WIRED25 Summit 2019 – Day 1 at Commonwealth Club on November 08, 2019 in San Francisco, California.
Matt Winkelmeyer | Getty Images
Meta‘s new Threads app has been live for less than two days, but one of the company’s top executives thinks prioritizing news and political discourse on the platform “is not at all worth” the apparent business and “platform” downsides.
In an unusually candid post on the new social network, Adam Mosseri, who oversees both Instagram and the text-based, Instagram-powered Threads, offered his insight on the matter. He stated that while politics and hard news will inevitably appear on Threads, the platform will not actively encourage those verticals. Mosseri believes that from a platform’s perspective, any minor increase in engagement or revenue driven by news and politics is not worth the scrutiny, negativity, and integrity risks associated with them.
The response from Meta to whether news or political content would be downranked on Threads, similar to what has been done on other platforms, remains unknown as there has been no comment from Meta representatives at this time.
Mosseri’s comment comes as Meta battles against governments attempting to impose charges on the company for leveraging newsrooms’ content for advertising and engagement purposes. In Canada, new legislation would require Meta to pay Canadian newsrooms, potentially costing them millions of dollars against their advertising revenue. As a result, Meta has blocked Canadian outlets from appearing in search results on Meta and Instagram, a restriction that may extend to Threads if search functionality is expanded. Google has also implemented a similar restriction.
Australia saw Meta employ the same technique when a similar law was passed in 2022.
Despite the decline of Twitter under Elon Musk’s ownership, government agencies, politicians, and journalists continue to rely on the platform for disseminating breaking news and emergency notifications.
Meta has not provided any further comment on the matter.
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