Threads, Instagram's Twitter-like app, is rolling out its “Trending Now” feature broadly to all users in the United States. The official rollout comes a month after the app started testing the feature with some users in the country. Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app's For You feed.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the official launch in a post on Threads, which the company sees as “an easy way to see what other people are talking about on Threads.” said.
The launch of trending topics allows users to discover timely conversations happening on social networks, making Threads more in line with X. Previously, Threads lacked a real-time sense of community, but with the introduction of Trending Topics you can see what people are currently discussing outside of what you see in your feed. , may help ameliorate this problem.
Meta previously told TechCrunch that trending topics are determined by Meta's AI system and based on what people are engaging with on threads. The system takes into account various factors, such as the number of people talking about a particular topic and the number of users who have participated in posts about the same topic.
This feature is somewhat limited, with threads showing only 5 trending topics at a time, whereas X shows multiple topics. Threads may limit the number of trending topics to prevent safety and spam issues.
Although Meta said Threads does not actively promote political content, many of the topics that frequently trend on the platform are political in nature. During President Biden's State of the Union address earlier this month, political topics dominated thread trends. Meta has distanced itself from politics on its platform for years, but the company isn't suppressing politics with Threads' trending features. However, that may change in the future.