NEW YORK : Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Meta's Twitter copycat app, Threads, as a"friendly" refuge for public discourse online, framing it in sharp distinction to the more adversarial Twitter which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
To be sure, Meta Platforms is no newbie at managing the rage-baiting, smut-posting internet hordes. The company said it would hold users of the new Threads app to the same rules it maintains on its photo and video sharing social media service, Instagram. For starters, the company will not extend its existing fact-checking program to Threads, spokesperson Christine Pai said in an emailed statement on Thursday. This eliminates a distinguishing feature of how Meta has managed misinformation on its other apps.
In a New York Times podcast on Thursday, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, acknowledged that Threads was more"supportive of public discourse" than Meta's other services and therefore more inclined to draw a news-focused crowd, but said the company aimed to focus on lighter subjects like sports, music, fashion and design.
Still, researchers specializing in online media said the devil would be in the details of how Meta approaches those interactions.