Move fast and beat Musk: The inside story of how Meta built Threads

Adam Mosseri was on a family vacation in Italy last November when he learnt he’d have to go toe-to-toe with Elon Musk. But once Musk took over Twitter, embarking on what Mosseri called “high-risk” decisions like limiting the reach of posts for users who hadn’t paid for verification, company executives inside Meta pounced. Instead of 30-minute presentations on a single design decision, typical at Facebook and Instagram, “it would be like, ‘Here are six things we need to go through this week.’” The process was a manifestation of what has been a divisive era at Meta, as it shed more than 20,000 workers in layoffs designed to return the business to what Zuckerberg has called “a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles.” To keep things moving, the Threads team punted thorny decisions and eschewed difficult features, including private messages and the ability to search for content or view the feeds of people you don’t follow. Meta can’t just “wish away” political discourse if it hopes to serve users fleeing from Twitter, said Yael Eisenstat, vice president at the Anti-Defamation League and a former senior Facebook policy official. “If there’s any company that should have learnt the lessons of the real damage that can be done by not building in the proper safety mechanisms, privacy assurances, and integrity products, it should be Meta.” I think things weren’t as amazing as people were saying when we were at the peak, and it’s certainly not as bad as people are saying now that we’re stabilising Adam Mosseri Meta’s Kim responded: “Our industry-leading integrity enforcement tools and human review are wired into Threads.” When Musk announced 1 July that Twitter would temporarily limit the number of tweets users can read per day to combat an influx of spam and bots, Meta took notice.