The Facebook company’s new social platform is like Twitter, but for celebrities, brands, and annoying people.
It’s no secret that Twitter has been imploding ever since being taken over by billionaire cringeposter Elon Musk. So it should be no surprise that Facebook parent company Meta is now launching its own Twitter clone, Threads, which promises to suck in slightly different ways than the blue bird site.
The myriad problems with Twitter have been well documented, and the launch of Threads is proof that Meta smells blood in the water. The app is a direct response to the mass-exodus of advertisers under Musk, whose increasingly blatant transphobia and racist conspiracy-peddling has left many users of the dying platform pining for a social app that is not overrun with Nazis and QAnon conspiracists.
Meta’s sales pitch for Threads seems to be simply that it’s not Twitter. It’s a text-based social network that is not actively falling apart, created by a monopolistic tech company known for privacy abuses and run by the second worst guy on earth. Even by these extremely low standards, it is not good.
To understand Threads, just imagine all the worst parts of Instagram and Twitter. The interface looks and feels like Instagram’s comments section, and there is no way to view posts chronologically on the timeline—or even to limit your feed to posts from accounts you follow. Instead, users see text posts based on what an invisible algorithm determines is most likely to make them engage and stay on the app, so they will see more ads.