Meta’s mercurial X/Twitter rival, Threads, is currently saturated with posts from new and returning users who have fled X in the wake of Elon Musk’s far-right pivot.
The exiles are introducing themselves to their fellow Threads users (all 200 million of them), seeking connections, and berating X’s divisive commander-in-chief as they find their bearings on the fledgling social media app.
What are people saying about Elon Musk on Threads?
“The Twitter exodus to Threads today must be setting new records,” posted actor Josh Gad, best known for voicing Olaf in Disney’s Frozen franchise, and playing Elder Arnold Cunningham in the Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon.
“Elon Musk is the Boeing of social media,” wrote Dean Obeidallah, a US satellite radio host, in a post comparing the Tesla boss’s managerial skills to the troubled US airplane manufacturer.
“Musk has been to Twitter what [Liz] Truss was to the British economy… Catastrophic,” exclaimed writer and podcaster Jemma Forte.
It’s no coincidence that the sudden influx of posts panning Musk’s X comes in the wake of the entrepreneur’s endorsement of Trump, and his subsequent interview with the former US president on Tuesday morning (Aug 13). The audio livestream was riddled with tech errors that almost derailed it altogether.
Back on Threads, Musk’s fiercest critics have seized upon his tweet blaming the bugs on a “massive DDOS attack” and turned it into a meme.
How does Meta’s Threads algorithm work and can you turn it off?
Make no mistake, Mark Zuckerberg’s one-year-old social media platform was already hot, reaching 100 million users in record time, but the current surge feels different. The barrage of posts lambasting Musk and X has some users wondering whether Meta is amplifying the content.
“Is it me or is the Threads algorithm promoting people who left Twitter. Well played Zuckerberg, well played,” said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor at the Northwestern University in Qatar, in a popular post that has garnered more than a thousand likes.
It’s more likely, however, that Threads is just home to a lot of users who simply dislike Musk and (ironically) are increasingly engaging with posts about him. Lifting the lid on how its algorithm works, Meta revealed that it’s influenced by user behaviour and post popularity. The platform considers factors such as how often you like and reply to posts, as well as how many others have engaged with content.
To give users more control, Threads offers a dual feed, with an algorithmic "For You" tab and a chronological "Following" timeline. While Meta insists the algorithm is still evolving, it's clear the platform is heavily reliant on AI to predict user preferences and curate content.
Is Threads poaching Twitter users?
Meanwhile, the jury is out on whether Threads is benefiting from a so-called “Twitter exodus”. TechCrunch dug into the trend but found no evidence of a mass migration in the data. Still, Threads is currently sitting pretty in second place on the Apple App Store in the UK, behind online shopping giant Temu.
So, how do you join the party? There are those that say it’s not enough to simply post on Threads, you have to fully abandon your Twitter profile in the process (which some, including this writer, have spent years slavishly trying to curate and build). Some users are actively encouraging and directing people to bin Twitter altogether.
Or, in the words of Threads user Juan Rivera: “Just deleting the bird app doesn’t count. You have to deactivate your bird account.”
