Internally at Meta, Threads Fails the Real-Time Test Too
Kalley Huang & Sylvia Varnham O'Regan
It's strange to me that the very vocal reply-people on Threads insist that the lack of truly real-time information isn't an issue or has been solved and "you're holding it wrong" while internally, Meta employees view this as a problem:
Shortly after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential election Sunday, an employee at Meta Platforms posted in the company’s internal forum that Threads, its text app, was missing in action.
“Biden dropped out 20 [minutes] ago and I can’t find anything on it in my feed,” the employee wrote in the post, which The Information viewed. When someone responded that Meta’s policy was not to recommend “civic” topics such as political news on Threads, another employee wrote: “If its the hottest unbiased topic of the day, I’m not sure what’s wrong with showing it in feed.”
This is a great revelation in my book as it shows that at least some in Meta see what the issue is here. It's more nuanced than simply surfacing the news, it's the vital ability to be a real-time information network in times such as these. We all know why Meta is resisting that call – they don't want to see Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress again, except perhaps wearing a chain this time – but it's actually a disservice. Xitter is a shitshow that many don't want to use any more but in times like these, it remains the pulse of the internet. And actually, the pulse of the world, in a way. It's the main pipeline for information to travel, even if "only" a few hundred million people are using it – too small for Meta to care about.
Yes, Threads was better this go-around with the news, but still not good enough. And it's in large part because of their stubborn insistence to default to one-feed-to-rule-them-all in 'For You':
But even the head of product for Threads, Emily Dalton Smith, was dissatisfied with how the policy played out on the app in the wake of Biden’s announcement, according to an internal post viewed by The Information.
In it, Dalton Smith complained that there was no trace of the news in her For You feed, the posts recommended for users by the app’s algorithm. “It feels broken that a topic overwhelming my following feed doesn’t show up at all in [For You],” she said in the post. Dalton Smith declined to comment.
Allowing users to default to 'Following' would help, but still not be perfect because it would require users to follow all sorts of news accounts (or hope those they follow re-share such information). Instead, I'd opt for some sort of toggle to switch to 'real-time' mode, where the algorithm works like, well, Xitter's. Yes, that brings all sorts of risks with disinformation and the like. But this is what Meta has been working to solve and combat for years now. And now we have AI. This is a trillion dollar company. They can do this. They have the technology.
But, of course, they don't want to do this:
Yet Biden posted the same statement on Threads just two minutes after putting it on X. The post on X has attracted 995,000 “likes” as of Tuesday, whereas it drew only 12,000 on Threads.
A spokesperson for Meta said: “As we said years ago, people wanted to see less politics, and have more control to be able to engage with political content if they wanted to – and that's exactly what we've been doing.”
Again, we get it. It's especially complicated right now because the real-time information that matters above all else is going to be political for the next few months. But what if, say, there was a giant earthquake somewhere? And people wanted to use Threads to get information about that in real time? Xitter has served the role in the past, but these days we'd get memes about earthquakes and fake information within minutes. We need you, Meta.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler