by: nick gambino
Meta is testing a “Trending Topics” section on Threads, a Twitter/X competitor app. This feature includes trending conversation topics collected in a central location by a team of AI and human curators. They scrape social media sites to find out what people are talking about the most and push it to other users who want to participate.
“We're rolling out a small test on Threads in the U.S. on today's topics,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Thread post. “We plan to roll out to more countries and languages once adjustments are complete.”
This list of trending topics appears in users' For You feeds as well as in the search section. This is very similar to a feature Twitter/X has had for years, and is another sign that Threads is going after their head. There's no denying that this is a very useful feature if you want to easily see what people are posting across your digital landscape. I always use this to check the news through X.
With AI involved in curation of these trending topics, it can quickly determine not only how many users are talking about a particular subject, but also how many users are engaging with those posts to make better decisions. You can now create lists. You can get these numbers if it's just a bunch of random accounts posting about a certain topic, but if a lot of people are participating in the comment section, you can see which topics are trending organically. It turns out that there is.
Interestingly, Mehta said Threads has no intention of pushing political content on its platform ahead of the 2024 presidential election. This new feature holds true to that promise. If Trending Topics works as they say it does, there's no reason why topics like Trump, Biden, and the election wouldn't be listed. These are going to be talked about ad nauseum in the coming months.
Perhaps there is a way to turn political content on and off. We don't know what impact this will have on trending topics. Will these topics be curated based on your interests? If this is a personalized features section, you might be able to control what you see.
