At best, you might be seeing tons of content that is of no interest to you whatsoever, or copypasta-style engagement bait. At worst? A whole lot of hate speech. In a short video shared on Friday responding to an Ask Me Anything question, Instagram head Adam Mosseri apologized for the “low-quality recommendations” proliferating on Threads and said the team is working on a fix.
“We want people to have a positive experience on Threads, and we’ve actually had some issues over the last few weeks with low-quality recommendations,” Mosseri said, “things that don’t quite violate our Community Guidelines – which is where we take content down entirely – but kind of go right up to that line. We’re working on improving it. A lot of it should be fixed at this point.” He goes on to say that while “there’s a lot more work to do,” users can “expect it to get much better over the next few weeks.”
Social Media Today reported that, as outlined by Mosseri, more Threads users have been shown more borderline content in the app, which is a problem that the team is working to fix, a it continues to improve the 6-month-old platform.
Though the borderline content issue is not a new one for social apps.
Back in 2018, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg provided a broad overview of the ongoing issues with content consumption, and how controversial content inevitably always gains more traction.
Here is a quote from Mark Zuckerberg that was posted on Social Media Today:
“One of the biggest issues that social networks face is that, when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content. This is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread on cable news today and has been a staple of tabloids for more than a century. At scale, it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization. In our case, it can also degrade the quality of our services.”
Zuckerberg further noted that this is a difficult challenge to solve, because “no matter where we draw the lines for what is allowed, as a piece of content gets close to that line, people will engage with it more on average – even when they tell us afterwards they don’t like the content.”
According to Social Media Today, it seems that Threads is now falling into the same trap, possibly due to its rapid growth, possibly due to the real-time refinement of its systems. But this is how all social networks evolve, with controversial content getting a bigger push, because that is actually what a lot of people are going to engage with.
In my opinion, it is good that Adam Mosseri is working on fixing the problem of the low-quality content that appears to be all over Threads. Doing so makes it clear that he is aware of the problem, and will try to clean up Threads.