The long-shot US presidential hopefuls making their pitches on Threads
Threads, the new Instagram app aimed at rivaling Twitter, many of the long-shot candidates were quick to take advantage of the platform's rapidly growing audience. «Buckle up and join me on Threads!» Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., wrote in a caption accompanying a selfie of himself and others in a car that he posted Thursday — by that morning, the app had already been downloaded more than 30 million times, putting it on track to be the most rapidly downloaded app ever.
But President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida remain absent from the platform so far. And that may be just fine with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, who told The New York Times' «Hard Fork» podcast Thursday that he does not expect Threads to become a destination for news or politics, arenas where Twitter has dominated the public discourse.
«I don't want to lean into hard news at all. I don't think there's much that we can or should do to discourage it on Instagram or in Threads, but I don't think we'll do anything to encourage it,» Mosseri said. The app, released Wednesday, was presented as an alternative to Twitter, with which many users became disillusioned after it was purchased by Elon Musk in October.
Lawyers for Twitter threatened legal action against Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook and Threads, accusing it of using trade secrets from former Twitter employees to build the new platform. Musk tweeted Thursday, «Competition is fine, cheating is not.» Trump has not been active on Twitter recently either, despite Musk's lifting the ban that was put on Trump's account after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
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