In the fight against X, threads get trending topics where politics is allowed

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After Meta's X competitor Threads admitted last week that it doesn't actively promote political content, the company today announced testing of a new trending feature, “Topics,” where such content might surface anyway. did. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that Threads will roll out the feature first in the U.S. to help users find “timely topics” being discussed by others on the social network. announced that it would begin small-scale testing.

The topic of the day in this section's title is determined by Meta's AI system and is based on what people are engaging with on the thread, Meta told TechCrunch. These topics appear in two places within the app: on the search page and in the For You feed.

Machine learning algorithms consider a variety of signals, such as the number of people talking about a particular topic and the number of people who have engaged with posts about the same topic. Meta says its team of content experts will ensure that topics do not violate the site's community guidelines and “other applicable integrity guidelines.” Mehta said his team will also check to see if there are any duplicate topics or if the topics covered are “pointless or misleading.”

In addition, users can flag potentially problematic content if a topic that violates our guidelines surfaces but is not immediately caught by the site's moderators.

Of course, what we wanted to know was whether Meta would suppress political content within topics, given that it declared last week that it would not recommend political content across its Instagram and Threads recommendation screens . The company explained at the time that the change affects areas such as Instagram Reels and Instagram Explore, as well as in-feed recommendations across both Instagram and Threads.

However, Mehta says he will not suppress political themes.

“Political content can also be a topic of discussion,” said a Meta representative. “We only remove political topics if they violate our Community Guidelines or other applicable integrity policies. Today's Topic is about reflecting timely and relevant topics in our apps. and not personalized recommendations,” they explained.

In other words, the topics are determined by an algorithm but are not personalized to the end user, so you won't get caught up in removing political content from Threads' recommendations.

This feature could make Threads even more competitive with rival It can provide the real-time capability that was previously lacking. It remains to be seen how much human oversight will be directed towards topic sections, but it's possible that Meta will manage it completely or leave it largely to algorithms.