Yes, we call it “ThreadsDeck” now.
At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new UI of Instagram Two weeks after first testing functionality that allows Threads users to pin columns to the home screen of the desktop web app, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri Announce On Thursday that this alternative view began to spread globally — just in time for everyone to discuss the year’s biggest political news: Trump’s rule.
The new UI option positions Threads as a more serious X competitor for those looking for real-time news and information, as it specifically allows users to get around Meta’s ill-considered decision to distance itself from political discussions across Instagram’s platforms. In February, the company announced that both Instagram and Threads would no longer “proactively” recommend political content — an odd choice for a potential Twitter/X rival in an election year.
It is not difficult to understand why the company made this decision. Meta has been repeatedly drawn into the political fray, especially in the United States where she has been located Republicans accused her From censorship of free speech and by Democrats for being too permissive Misleading and misleading information. With its entry into the real-time social networking space and its positioning of Threads as an alternative public forum to Elon Musk’s X, Meta quickly caught the attention of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) last year.
When Threads was just a few weeks old, Jordan wrote to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with questions about the app’s content moderation policies. here we go againprobably dead, he thought.
Instead of dealing with the headache, the subjects turned their backs on politics. The company said it will no longer proactively include political content in threads’ feed recommendations or recommend it across various surfaces on Instagram.
But even though Threads wanted to eschew politics in favor of creator content, its users didn’t.
Even after the policy change, political content regularly dominated topic trends. When President Biden gave his State of the Union address in March, for example, terms referring to the address itself, hecklers, and Republican reaction were in vogue. Today, the network is filled with discussions regarding Trump’s sentencing, as would be expected on any real-time social platform.
Easier to follow real-time news
With Threads’ previous UI, keeping track of different threads, threads, and discussions was much more difficult — and more importantly, it didn’t feel real time. Navigating between the For You and Following feeds requires clicking back and forth. There was no easy way to track an area of interest in an ongoing manner. This changes with the alternative layout based on Threads columns, which users have dubbed “ThreadsDeck.”
You can now pin For You and Following feeds side-by-side, as well as Likes, Saved, Profile, Activity or Search Feed that highlights the top trends. More importantly, you can search for any topic you want to track — “Trump,” for example — and add it as a separate column as well.
Furthermore, any column outside of the For You feed can be toggled to allow automatic updates, like TweetDeck. Better yet, it’s not a subscriber-only feature, e.g Xpro.
This change goes a long way to making Threads feel like it works like Twitter/X, regardless of Meta’s ban on political content.
The ban confuses users, who don’t understand how Meta will decide which content to block. Would it be okay to take a photo of Taylor Swift if she was holding Biden-Harris cookies? one user recently asked When publishing an algorithm test.
Mosseri tried to explain that the company’s work around policy happens “primarily at the account level, not the position level.” he is too I tried to explain again that Threads was not “anti-news.”This will not “amplify political news.”
“News related to sports, music, fashion and culture is something we actively seek out. Political news is the topic [we] “They’re looking to be more careful.” He said in one response.
In every instance where this issue comes up, user responses fill the thread, expressing their disagreement with Meta’s position.
Some of those shots were more accurate than others.
“There is simply no way a viable real-time social media platform can get away without being, in part, a news platform.” The journalist scolded the technology Lance Ulanov. “Lean on it and figure out how to support it all in a way that avoids the mistakes of everyone left in your wake.”
Another simply shouted“Give us news!”
At least now, users no longer have to wait for Meta to change its mind — they can customize the app to meet their requests for automatically updated information in real-time on various topics, including politics.
If Threads succeeds in replacing X as a news platform, it will be despite its misguided policies around political content, not because of them. And because it finally gave users the tools – via ThreadsDeck – to create the app they wanted for themselves.
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