Why Threads Is Bad for the News Business

By now we have all read myriad analyses of Threads, Instagram’s new Twitter killer. You’ve probably seen that Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over the app, alleging that the company stole “trade secrets.” Hmm, I wonder how the lawsuit will affect the big MMA fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk?

While there are a lot of angles to analyze, I can’t stop thinking about what the early traction of Threads means for the news business. The upshot: It’s not good. 

Let’s think about this. A tech platform, in a matter of hours, skyrocketed to millions of new users—almost 50 million now—using an algorithm (informed by your Instagram followers) to predict exactly what you want to read from your friends. That’s the amazing thing to me about Threads. You can’t (yet) manually limit your Threads to people you want to follow. Meta is using its vast machine-learning knowledge to predict what discussions will be the most engaging to you—the direction in which it has been taking Instagram too.