Threads was next to useless on election night (but that’s kind of the point)
Where did you turn for election night news? The platform formerly known as Twitter? Bluesky? The Meta-owned Threads?
Those who chose the latter hoping for timely updates about the presidential election being closely watched in the U.S. and around the world on Tuesday were disappointed. Threads users were confronted with a non-chronological feed that made the app borderline unusable on election night. With results streaming in, the default “For You” feed was consistently out-of-date and out-of-step — posts about a “red mirage” and exit polls topping final results and more recent takes. (Top posts in my personal feed were consistently about dogs or distance running.)
Threads, launched in July 2023 as a rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter, now has 275 million monthly active users. (Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the app is signing up more than 1 million users per day.) On Thursday, one of the trending topics on Threads was “deleted Twitter.” A number of users said they were ditching X as part of a larger effort to unplug from political news.
When Donald Trump first won the presidency, news organizations saw a surge of new subscribers, traffic, and support. If the trending post-election posts on Threads are any indication, news organizations may be facing a much different situation for Trump’s second term. A “Trump bump” might be replaced with what Edmund Lee, an editor on the trust team at The New York Times, called a “Trump dump” as news consumers feel overwhelmed at the idea of keeping up with another chaotic term or frustrated with coverage leading up to the election.
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