The next four months will put that theory to the test.
Hastily created in the midst of the chaos surrounding Musk’s Twitter acquisition, Threads attracted millions of users overnight as celebrities, politicians, Instagrammers and corporate brands flocked to the simple, text-based app, which briefly looked poised to challenge or even surpass Birdsight as the world’s virtual water cooler chat destination.
Threads continues to grow, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing on Wednesday morning that the app has added about 25 million active users over the past three months. But that’s only a small part of the size of the X.
Mosseri believes people — and the advertisers who have made meth products profitable for years — are craving a platform that offers the latest news and commentary on celebrities, sports teams and fashion trends without being bogged down in political debate.
He said in a recent interview that his goal is to create “a less angry place for people to share their thoughts.”
That feel-good spirit last week At VidCon, an annual convention for online video content creators in Anaheim, Calif., Meta hosted a huge “creator cafe” where it offered free coffee and pastries to influencers who listened to the company explain their use of Threads. On Thursday, the company celebrated Threads’ birthday by unveiling a frosted chocolate cake decorated with black ribbons and bearing the Threads logo on top.
Creators said they enjoy the platform not as a replacement for X (which they barely use anyway) but as a low-risk alternative to Instagram.
Sohie Carpenter, a fitness influencer with more than 639,000 followers on Instagram and just under 100,000 on Threads, said she finds Threads “a lot more relaxing.”
It’s no secret that influencers are appealing to Instagram users. The question is, will their posts also appeal to users of a fast-paced, text-heavy platform like Threads?
“Threads doesn’t have a fully formed identity yet,” says Jasmine Engberg, vice president and principal analyst at market research firm Emarketer. To thrive in the long term, she says, “it needs a community and a purpose that’s not just a cross-post from Instagram.”
When Threads launches on July 5, 2023, it enters an increasingly crowded field of potential Twitter alternatives. From the shaky Mastodon to the cutting-edge Bluesky, Twitter refugees have tried out a string of emerging alternatives and mostly rejected them.
Backed by the world’s most powerful social media giant, Threads quickly rose to prominence, attracting more than 100 million users in the first five days thanks to its built-in network of people who could be followed on sister app Instagram, including comedian Ellen DeGeneres, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and singer Selena Gomez. But once the novelty wore off, the app’s growth stalled.
Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly active users, more than three times the size of Threads. But some independent analysts have noted that X has been shrinking, not growing, since Musk acquired it in October 2022. eMarketer estimates that X will have about 56 million U.S. users at the end of 2023, compared with Threads’ 29 million users, but the company expects the gap to close in 2024.
Mosseri says Threads’ growth hasn’t been down to any bold move. Instead, he attributes it to expansion in international markets (particularly Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam), continued turnover from X and an agile team that keeps delivering new features and updates. The app has grown into a full-fledged X alternative, with a chronological “follow” feed, an edit button, search functionality, trending hashtags and a desktop version with a customizable feed (though not private messaging).
Mosseri said these features are essential to meet the needs of Threads’ “most engaged users,” but they aren’t “transformative” for growth or engagement. “The most successful features are the least sexy,” he said.
That includes behind-the-scenes improvements to the ranking algorithm Threads uses for its default “For You” feed, which some users have criticized for showing them posts they don’t like. Mosseri said Threads has gotten better at “interest modeling,” or figuring out what kinds of posts each user wants to see, but that “Instagram is still a lot better at it.”
There’s a reason why Meta is distancing itself from politics: Americans are becoming less and less interested in political news. The rise of social media has caused trust in media brands to plummet, according to the Pew Research Center, which has previously said people use platforms like Facebook and Instagram more to share updates about their lives and follow creators than to follow the news.
Twitter has gained cultural relevance through news and commentary, promoting its users’ “citizen journalism” as a better alternative to newspapers. But advertisers have long shunned the platform due to its toxicity and poor marketing tools. Big brands often avoid placing ads near political content, preferring to promote their products alongside less controversial topics.
Meta initially envisioned Threads as an Instagram for words, a place for influencers, celebrities, and everyday social media users to share text-based updates with their friends and followers (before it was called Threads, the team half-jokingly called the project Textagram).
But Gen Z, drawn to TikTok and the ephemeral photo-sharing app Snapchat, is less likely to stick to text, even in comments: A quarter of thread posts contain at least one photo, according to Meta.
Mosseri said he envisions Threads not only as a “conversation space” but also as a place to comment on events as they unfold in real time, from sports to television shows to natural disasters. Topics tend to get stale if they aren’t seen quickly, and in response, Threads has tweaked its “For You” algorithm, originally borrowed from Instagram’s slower-paced system, to emphasize more recent posts.
“It’s still a little late,” Mosseri said, “but it’s getting better.”
He cited the magnitude 4.8 earthquake that shook the East Coast in April as an example: “You know when there’s an earthquake, people post, ‘Was that an earthquake?'” he said of the phenomenon long associated with Twitter. “The first time that actually happened in real time on a thread, it was like, ‘Okay, this is starting to make some headway.'”
Threads has had some limited wins in the pop culture sphere. Celebrities like Serena Williams, Cardi B, and Shonda Rhimes post regularly, but most stars seem content to stick to Instagram.
In April, Taylor Swift, the music star who disrupted the economy, made her first appearance on Threads to promote her latest album. The app poured engineering resources into the promotion, creating special sparkle effects and celebratory hearts for reactions and shares of Swift-related content. The album was one of its top five tags for the past three months, along with “PhotographyThreads,” “BookThreads,” “GymThreads,” and “ArtThreads,” according to the company.
Swift hasn’t posted on the app since April, despite having 10 million followers on Threads.
Mosseri acknowledged that the company has struggled to clarify and defend its positions on news and politics, given that social media platforms, including Meta, have long been influential in politics and social movements, from the Arab Spring and the growing #MeToo movement to Donald Trump’s political career.
“It’s not that we’re not interested in the news,” Mosseri said. “What we don’t want to do is jingoism,” he said, referring to posts about elections, wars and even “social issues” that would jingoism by showing those posts to users who don’t want to see that kind of news.
For example, exposing someone to a “hot take that’s either very pro-Palestinian or very pro-Israeli” could be problematic in a number of ways, he said: promoting the post to users who already agree with it could reinforce an “echo chamber” effect, while promoting it to users who disagree risks turning the site into an “outrage factory.”
Politicians appear to have taken the hint: Fewer than 100 lawmakers have official Threads accounts, according to a Washington Post analysis. And among them, there are sharp partisan divisions: About 1 in 5 Democrats posted to the app at least once in June, but Republicans (3%) did the same. About 97% of lawmakers from both parties posted to X in June.
Meta has been careful about how it determines which posts and accounts qualify as political and how it defines social issues. Spokesperson Seine Kim said the company uses machine learning algorithms to identify potentially political posts and accounts on Threads and Instagram, then doesn’t recommend them to users who don’t already follow them. She noted that users on both platforms can change their settings to opt in to political recommendations.
For now, Threads is happy to attract influencers, creators and entertainers, and Mosseri said he doesn’t expect it to completely replace X. This could make the social media market more fragmented than before, forcing people to use multiple networks to find the same audience and content they previously found on Twitter.
But Anil Dash, a software executive who has built tools for social media developers, said the lack of a single “Twitter killer” could be healthy for the entire social media ecosystem.
“You can’t create something healthier than McDonald’s by just creating another fast-food restaurant,” he says, “by having a variety of options: fun local restaurants, good quality ingredients, etc. The same thing can be said with technology: combining different options, some of which are healthier, some of which are more family-run.”
Taylor Lorenz, Jeremy Merrill and Hayden Godfrey contributed to this report.
