Meta has been taking heat for engagement-bait posts on Threads, but the company is sticking by comments — and the idea of posts that “drive conversation” — as a way to decide what should get recommended.
If you haven’t been on Threads following the saga, here’s a quick recap.
Last month, Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos experimented with posting rage-bait content on Threads and found that posts that prompted people to get angry in her comments often performed very well on the app.
Since then, Threads has been full of debates around rage bait, content moderation, and political content on the Twitter-like platform.
Last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri — who also oversees Threads — wrote in a Threads post that Meta knows there has been an increase in engagement-bait Threads and that it was “working to get it under control.” Then on Friday, Mosseri posted that Threads “found mistakes” in its content moderation enforcement.
The debate has come as Threads has continued to pick up steam among users. Threads, which is just over a year old, had more than 230 million global monthly active users in September, the marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated. The last official figure, which Mosseri shared in August, was that Threads had surpassed 200 million monthly users. For comparison, Sensor Tower estimated that X (formerly Twitter) had over 315 million global MAUs as of September.
BI spoke with Emily Dalton Smith, a VP of product management at Meta and the head of Threads, about its latest recommendations for creators using the app — and the path ahead.
If there’s one takeaway Dalton Smith has for creators using Threads, it’s that they should remember it’s “a real-time conversation app.”
“Most of the content will be distributed in just a few hours over the course of the day,” Dalton Smith told BI. “Making sure that you’re talking about things that are happening now and that are really timely and relevant will go a long way.”
Here are five takeaways from BI’s conversation with Meta’s Emily Dalton Smith:
The post Threads app chief shares her top advice for creators on how and when to post — as the engagement-bait debate swirls appeared first on Business Insider.
