Is Threads The Good Place?
Once upon a time on social media, the nicest app of them all, Instagram, home to animal bloopers and filtered selfies, established Threads, a hospitable alternative to the cursed X, Formerly Known as Twitter. X had been taken over by the Dark Lord Musk, he who reopened X’s gateway to its banished demons Donald Trump, Kanye West and Andrew Tate.
The good people of X tried to flee, scattering to Mastodon and Bluesky, whose distant confines they then complained about on X.
But Threads would provide a new refuge. It would be Twitter But Nice, a Good Place where X’s liberal exiles could gather.
I joined Threads shortly after its July 5 debut. At the beginning, early adopters waited by the sidelines, present but not posting.
As more participants joined Threads, a palpable enthusiasm broke out.
“All right, let’s do this thing,” U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posted. “May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humor and less harassment.”
And now, after 10 months, we can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind.
Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou. It knows, for example, exactly where you stand with regard to the Middle East; gender ideology; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; body positivity; neurodivergence; Covid and the creative industries and shows you posts screaming from whichever position is just far enough from your own to drive you out of your mind.
Arguments you probably didn’t know existed (“Every time I see a white person in a kaffiyeh, I wonder: How much have you studied the issue?”) devolve into accusations around tokenism, solidarity and identity. There is something guaranteed to offend anyone who wants to get offended.
“Threads is a great example of how the left gets in its own way by parsing absolutely everything and anything anyone says or writes that is mildly positive or not negative enough or blah blah blah,” noted one user.
Rather than display the cat content I seek, its landing page defaulted to an algorithmic “For you,” and what Threads thought was “for me” was a tailor-made stream of trigger bait. I would be faced with Princess Catherine trutherism, purity tests to weed out the merely progressive from the resolutely anticapitalist and debates over who is the most anti-Zionist in the precisely correct way.
“Threads seems to be purposely pushing content that opposes your personal beliefs & values — Thus getting everyone TRIGGERED,” one user wrote.
Last month, the novelist Daniel Torday posted, “This space has become almost as unusable as twitter was. I’m out.”
“There’s some kind of algorithm that’s dusting up the same kind of outrage that Twitter had,” Mr. Torday explained a few weeks later by phone. “Threads feels like it’s splintering the left.”
But where else to go? You could skulk back to the Other Place. You could red-pill over to Truth Social, where reposts go by the unnerving term “ReTruths” in a cosmos devoid of people interested in factbased reality. You could crosspost on Bluesky and Mastodon, Reddit and Threads. According to social media analysts, the kinds of debates that used to animate Facebook and Twitter are retreating into private group chats.
The fragmentation of social media may have been as inevitable as the fragmentation of broadcast media. Perhaps also inevitable, any social media app aiming to succeed financially must capitalize on the worst aspects of social behavior. And it may be that Hobbes, history’s cheery optimist, was right: “The condition of man is a condition of war of every one against every one.” Threads, it turns out, is just another battlefield.