What if someone invented Instagram without the cute golden retriever photos, without any of the fun? What if someone invented Twitter without any of the serious and snarky back-and-forth about news, politics, ideas, or essential information about weather or pandemics.
Someone did. That someone is the one company that didn’t have to do much to continue to dominate the world of social media and online advertising: Meta. The largest and richest social media company in the world and one of the most powerful surveillance and propaganda forces in the world, has introduced something that almost looks and feels like Twitter and almost looks and feels like Instagram.
It’s called Threads, and it hit a record by gathering more than 100m registrations in its first five days of existence. Of course, it did this by inviting its 1.8 billion Instagram users to use those credentials and import followers from Instagram to Threads. So it was easy. Easy ain’t always interesting, though. And there is hardly anything interesting about the technology or the content on Threads.
When I open up Threads all I see is a series of posts that read like fortune cookies. They are a series of positive affirmations. It’s lots of people offering therapeutic salves that purport to help everyone. One of the first Threats (the best thing I can think of to call a post on Threads) I read was: “Today’s Reminder: Don’t forget to take a deep breath.” A few scroll motions later I found: “Broken crayons still color.” The vapidity of the Threads experience makes me yearn for the trolls of Twitter.
One might assume that Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to muscle in on the revenue Twitter makes – or, more accurately, made before Elon Musk put himself into massive debt to buy it. But Twitter, even in its better days, never made money. It was a dumb business and it’s just getting dumber. Meta, with more than three billion users across four of the top-six social media platforms in the world, did not need this tiny sliver of attention and the revenue that might come from it. Twitter, after all, never cracked the top ten platforms in the world. It never had more than 250 million users. And it could never figure out how to sell advertisements well.
Meta knows how to grow and how to place ads that get clicked. But all it can do now, with Twitter fading, is eat into its own revenue from its more successful platforms. It’s not clear what the point of Threads is to the company. And it’s even more baffling to think about what it means to us.
Ask yourself: “What purpose did Twitter serve in my day, back when it had interesting people writing interesting things?”
If you felt like having an argument or just learning the latest thing about the latest thing, Twitter was a good way to do those things. Many people erroneously deemed Twitter as a “public square”. It was neither public nor square. It perhaps simulated what some people imagined might happen if we had such a thing as a global public sphere. But it was and is commercial and very limited in what it could offer to anyone who wished to inform, learn, or persuade. While millions might be using Twitter at any one time, one’s Tweets would only flow in the feeds of a few dozen, maybe hundreds. Occasion Tweets would rocket around within language groups if many people liked or re-Tweeted them. But that was unpredictable and unsystematic. That’s no way to run an information machine.
That’s because Twitter never was an information machine. It was and is an emotion machine. Its fundamental emotion is indignation. We all overdid it with indignation in the best days of Twitter. Even nice people over-indulged, which is why it was ultimately corrosive to public deliberation and civic virtue. Journalists, pundits, elites, and activists thrive on indignation. But so do trolls, harassers, and Nazis.
#BlackLivesMatter, the main and perhaps sole positive consequence of Twitter’s time on Earth, was a function of focused, enlightened, justified indignation. Those who promoted and rallied around that hashtag did so consciously and provocatively, leveraging the nature of Twitter’s design toward the goal of breaking through the fog of political and social ennui. #BlackLivesMatter was the exception, and remains exceptional. But to happen at all, Twitter had to be designed to allow for the tracking and search of hashtags.
On Threads, there are no hashtags. Meta has opted not to facilitate them, so there is no way the heart of Twitter could happen on Threads.
Instagram head and Threads founder Adam Mosseri says algorithms won’t promote serious or political content. “We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place,” he wrote on his Threads account.
“The goal is 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, but not all of Twitter,” Mosseri wrote in a conversation on Threads with a reporter. “Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads – they have on Instagram as well, to some extent – but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”
Mosseri does not want negativity spoiling his platitude party. Twitter was designed to amplify indignation. Threads has been designed to impede indignation. Without indignation, what’s the point? But indignation and negativity are not the same thing. One (and one’s deliberative community) can be harshly critical, negative about some injustice or trend or power, and still uphold the sorts of civil decorum that invites more voices rather than repels them.
If you were to create a digital public square you would have to engage smaller communities of users, generate strong community standards of deliberation and standards of discourse, and give up on the idea of a global network. There are virtues to anarchistic global networks with billions of users who write in more than 100 languages, but they are not the virtues of community nor of a “public square.” Squares don’t fit around globes. Networks of billions are something, but they are not town meetings. And even town meetings are more often than not counterproductive, draining, distracting, and destructive.
The challenge of generating the quality and quantity of public deliberation among engaged citizens has been occupying theorists and practitioners for more than 200 years. No coder in Silicon Valley is going to build the thing that lifts us from this cacophony. So far, all the things tech giants have brought us have contributed to cacophony and undermined democracy.
Content moderation is crucial to fulfilling the goal of “free speech.” Cacophony and trolling erode the power of speech and silence the vulnerable. Now devoid of responsible content moderation, Twitter is overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls. It still has many millions of interested and interesting users, but those who should be (and were) verified for their prominence to limit the influence of those who would mimic and misrepresent them. Instead, Musk has decided to lie about verification and grant the blue check mark that used to indicate verification to those willing to pay money.
Twitter is eating itself with a series of bad decisions. While many proclaim Threads as the “Twitter killer”, the real Twitter-killer app is Twitter itself.
Earlier this week, Taliban-affiliated leader Anas Haqqani declared his preference for Musk’s Twitter over Threads. “Twitter has two important advantages over other social media platforms,” Haqqani wrote on Twitter. “The first privilege is the freedom of speech. The second privilege is the public nature & credibility of Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have an intolerant policy like Meta. Other platforms cannot replace it.” That might be all you need to know about Elon Musk and 2023 Twitter. If the Taliban prefers it, you and I and every decent person probably should not.
The moral of this saga is that no one can nostalgically replicate the experience of Twitter circa 2011 to 2021, just as no one can replicate the web of 1996-2001 or the blogosphere of 2004-09 before Twitter wiped it out. The internet is never the same river twice.
By the way, I just made a bet, pledging to give $100 to the charity of writer Jeff Yang’s choice if Threads reaches 200 million daily active users by July 2025. He’s convinced it will thrive. I am convinced it will fade.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is also Guardian US columnist
