Instagram's new Twitter-like app, Threads, is hardly prepared to eventually challenge Elon Musk's X, if recent statements by Instagram head Adam Mosseri hold true. Quoting a post about Threads' position on hard news, Mosseri explained, "We did not aim to amplify news on our platform.". His appointment is no surprise, though a depressing one for those desiring to leave X in search of grassier pastures. Meta has had complicated relationships with publishers of news on both Instagram and Facebook, battling fake news, clickbait, and accusations of political bias.

While Meta-owned Threads has surely made its share of mistakes in the past, it still can at least hope to collect X users who are not satisfied with changes that Musk is implementing into the platform, the last update of which bizarrely removed news headlines in an attempt at not losing any further X users from leaving the app. However, if Threads refuses to embrace news out of fear of being scared into becoming a hostile media network as Twitter did, then it will also never be allowed to be a 1:1 replacement for Twitter.

So at an Instagram creator event last week, Mosseri outlined the company's approach to news, saying "We want to empower creators in general. We try not to lean too hard into news. We're not anti-news," he explained, noting that news would always be on Instagram. "But having worked on Facebook for a long time and leaning in really hard there, we want to be really careful not to over-promise and under-deliver.".

He then repeated these same words in a Threads post about the company's plans to address — or rather, not to address — news. Wrote Mosseri:

We are not anti-news. News is undoubtedly already on Threads. People can share news; people can follow accounts that share news. We are not going to get in the way of either. But we are also not going to amplify news on the platform. It's too risky with the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes.

While it is perhaps fair to suggest that Threads is perhaps too young to have a clear strategy on how to deal with news and the necessary moderation that this entails, the need for an X alternative has become more urgent in light of the escalations in misinformation being spread on X regarding the Israel-Hamas war. As a result, several reporters hopped over to Threads this weekend to establish themselves and build a following. Journalists who are notable for spreading a viral post that encouraged the rest of journalists to do the same.

If Threads' role is not going to be one to "amplify" news, it is going to be a miserable X replacement. News and information in real-time are the lifeblood of X, and it's a hard formula to reproduce. Threads was lucky to have even gotten a shot at that, and it seems like a shot it does not want to take.

In fact, Mosseri is wrong that Threads isn't interfering with news — the company has already blocked a number of search terms that have news value, according to The Washington Post.
In the light of no news focus, the key question for Threads is how it will fulfill its mission of creating space for discussions at scale.

Mark Zuckerberg recently told The Verge perhaps the avoidance of news in Threads is the solution.

He goes on to say that he would venture to guess, "Twitter designers probably didn't want to make an app that made people feel bad, but the app "indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical.".

"I think they wanted to have a maximum kind of intense debate, right? Which I think that sort of creates a certain emotional feeling and load," he said. "I always just thought you could create a discussion experience that wasn't quite so negative or toxic. I think in doing so, it would actually be more accessible to a lot of people," Zuckerberg added.

Meaning: In short, Threads wants to be "a more positive, friendly place for discussion," in Zuckerberg's words, rather than a site that generates conversations around news events leading to debates.

But a friendly place for discussion can also be a dull place to be. That's something X, for all its faults, is not.

As X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in the Code Conference a few weeks ago, "You gotta admit, it's not boring…There is no surrogate for X."

As if even the leaders of Threads were surprised by it.