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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, as you know, he's implemented or overseen changes that have frustrated many loyal users like reinstating accounts previously banned for violating user guidelines, he laid off about half of Twitter's staff resulting not only in those lost jobs, but in more bugs and outages on the site for users. This may be why a handful of Twitter alternatives have since emerged as new or more prominent. Maybe you've heard some of these names or are on these platforms yourself, Spoutible, Spill, Bluesky, Mastodon, but none have made quite the splash that Threads has.

Threads, as you probably heard by now, boasts something that none of these other Twitter rivals does, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who adds to a portfolio that already, of course, includes Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg says 100 million people signed up for Threads within its first week. Who among you listening right now has signed up for Threads? 212-433-WNYC. How would you compare it to Twitter if you were also using that? Will you now use both? Will you use them for different things? Is one ethically suspect tech mogul any better than another to get your social media from? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

We'll talk about the new site, whether it threatens to kill off its old musky rival, and what it means that one company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, now owns three social media services with millions and millions or is it billions of users. Joining me now, Mike Isaac, who covers Meta, that's the Zuckerberg company, for The New York Times and other tech. He's based in the San Francisco area. Hi, Mike. Welcome back to WNYC. Thanks so much for getting up early West Coast time to do this.

Mike Isaac: Thanks, Brian, for having me. No problem.

Brian Lehrer: Underneath your byline on one of the stories you reported about Threads, you wrote that you've signed up for dozens of social media services over the last 25 years. Are you on Threads?

Mike Isaac: I am. I think a lot of those are in the social media graveyard for me. I don't even know if I have zombie accounts still going, but I am on Threads, and I've been exploring it in its first days. Have you been messing around with it at all?

Brian Lehrer: I have not personally done that yet. No. I'm in your hands and in our listeners' hands. How similar or different on first impression is it to Twitter as an experience for the user?

Mike Isaac: I've been thinking about it as a Twitter lite. Twitter has been around for 17, almost 18 years now. It's got tens of millions of users, but it's always been really impenetrable for the average person to use because there's so many in jokes and hard to figure out who to follow. Threads is basically easy to get up and running immediately basically by importing your entire graph of people you follow on Instagram on Threads.

I guess the problem I would say is it feels a little sterile right now. It's very much celebrities who were definitely coaxed into coming on earlier, tweeting fairly anodyne things to get people excited, and then a bunch of brands absolutely crashing in to capitalize on the earliest days of being on a new social network and trying to gain their following. Where Twitter feels like a insane party that is spinning out into madness at 2:00 AM, let's say, Threads feels like something a lot more tame. I'm not quite sure if I like that or not yet.

Brian Lehrer: One person I know who did sign up for Threads said, "I don't know if I love the fact that automatically all the people I follow on Instagram are in my Threads feed." I think the example I heard was somebody's personal trainer from the gym, and like, "Do I want that person on my Threads feed seeing what I'm writing about politics and those kinds of things?"

Mike Isaac: That has been a real disconnect for me too. As you might imagine, journalists are super addicted to Twitter. We're all on it all the time for news and stuff, but my Instagram is where I post photos of what I cook, or my dog, or concerts I've gone to. It's just super different contexts and different people follow me on those networks. That's been a real culture clash for me, but I think for a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to act.

I think the other thing is we are different versions of ourselves based on the context of what social network we're on, and figuring out a new one so quickly with so many people on it right away-- the other thing is Twitter, or even Facebook, Instagram, all grew gradually over time. This basically has been transplanted almost overnight into a huge place. I think everyone's trying to still figure out how to act, and who they want to even interact with, and how to import those people from different parts of their life to this new social network. It's going to feel weird. I feel like if it sticks around, it's going to feel weird for a while.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, because if Twitter is for news and snark, and Instagram is for cute photos of your kids, and your pets, and your concerts, like you said, are those two worlds going to integrate? Do you take Zuckerberg's number at face value, 100 million users signing up for Threads in this first week of its existence?

Mike Isaac: I think it's a good point. The one thing to really remember is there's a difference between a person downloading an app for the first time or at least just figuring out what's going on in a new place, and then actually sticking around, or not immediately deleting it, which I've seen a number of folks do. I think they're in a better place than, let's say, social media networks of the past.

Google+ comes to mind. They had 90 million signups in the first year, and a bunch of those people over time were zombies. I think Google+ isn't exactly the same as Instagram and Threads, because for Google, it was really just basically shoving social networks into all of their properties that we use like Gmail, or Calendar, or Search. Those aren't social networks. We're not used to interacting with people necessarily inside of our calendar.

I think there's more, what in the tech world they call more adjacencies around Instagram and Threads because it's a similar-ish kind of activity, or let's say similar to Facebook posting text again. One problem is people who are used to posting photos on Instagram aren't exactly the same-- or don't exactly have the hang of posting text on Threads quite yet, and I think the jokes are not really landing.

Brian Lehrer: Is Threads aspiring to be any different than Twitter in the way that people use it, or didn't Zuckerberg even think it through to that degree? He just wanted to compete with Elon Musk, and he had the power to do it because of Facebook and Instagram. You know what I mean? Does he have a model in mind of how this is going to exist in the world?

Mike Isaac: I think you're totally right in that he saw a window here. Elon Musk has been fascinating as a business case study because I've never seen anyone ruin so much goodwill so quickly inside of a year. Most of the past 10 years, he's been this celebrated figure in the tech industry. A lot of people see him as the successor to Steve Jobs, as an icon that technologists want to look up to, and I think he has just posted his way on Twitter towards being way more controversial and turning a lot of people off.

Zuckerberg saw that immediately, and he is not one to cede any territory in the social media landscape. He's fiercely competitive, and he went after it. To your point, I think they're figuring out the rest afterwards, what should this look like? One thing they did say on day one, both Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram said, "We want this to be a friendlier place than Twitter." I think that's probably a good thing to aspire to in the way that when I open up Twitter, some of the times I often leave it feeling worse than I did when I got on it. I don't know about you, but it's just--

Brian Lehrer: Why? Why in your case?

Mike Isaac: Well, I don't know. It's probably that I have a good amount of followers, and it's either I'm inundated with hate speech depending on what corner of politics Twitter I've stumbled into, or someone just hit me at the wrong time with an insult that got to me, and I'm just like, "Oh, that doesn't feel good." The interactions are just not nice all the time. To be fair, there's some really crazy cool things. I've met friends and stuff through Twitter, but I don't know, more often than not, let's say, over the past year, it's not left me feeling good. I think that's what Threads aspires to, is we want you to leave and not feel bad after you've looked at stuff here.

Brian Lehrer: I guess I've had this, I don't know, maybe bivalent relationship with Twitter. Of course, you and I, neither of us are representative of the world at large because of what we do for a living, but often I have the experience that you just described, where I'll go on Twitter, and so much of what I see is people harshly attacking each other or attacking people in the news or celebrities or whatever, and it's like, "It's so rough and tumble. Do I want to deal with this right now?" By the same token, sometimes it's the first thing I look at in the morning just to see what news people are talking about.

Mike Isaac: Oh, totally. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Go ahead.

Mike Isaac: Oh, I think that's the brilliance and addictiveness of Twitter for people like you and I, but also I think for even folks who like being tuned into the news. I think 2016 gave Twitter a particular boost because of how pressing news in the United States in particular was and how something new during the Trump administration was happening every day, and something a lot of folks felt was very pressing and very important to get immediately. It's a fundamental issue around the internet in general.

Being connected to tens of millions, if not billions of people on the planet instantly is a very powerful thing, and I think it comes with both positives and negatives and weighing that every morning as I wake up first thing in the morning is rough to reckon with, but it's become automatic for some people.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking about the first week of the existence of Threads, Mark Zuckerberg's new social media site that immediately has something like 100 million users as he tries to compete with Twitter and as it's an outlet for some people who had gotten too fed up with Twitter for political reasons or for aggravation reasons or whatever. Let's hear from some callers as we continue with Mike Isaac who reports on this for The New York Times, some folks who've downloaded it. Phil in Shaker Heights, Ohio, you're on WNYC. Hi, Phil.

Phil: Hi, Brian. Thanks for putting me on. First about connecting through Instagram, when I joined Threads, it offered me the selection of the people I follow on Instagram and I could choose whether to follow them on Threads, it didn't automatically follow everybody from Instagram. Then another thing that surprised me about how quickly I enjoyed Threads is that it has verification, so Instagram had-- I never even noticed, I'm not a heavy user of Instagram, but Instagram gives a blue check for whomever has verified their identity, and Twitter used to do that, but Mr. Musk removed that. He instead gave a blue check to anybody who would pay him $8, and he pops up there.

The blue check threads rank higher in your Twitter stream, so Twitter immediately became much less valuable, and I was a big fan of Twitter. Now Threads has verified accounts, and I can know who I'm talking to.

Brian Lehrer: Do you, for your purposes, plan to use both, or are you still figuring that out, or have you abandoned Twitter?

Phil: I am still figuring that out. I expect that I'll be on Twitter much less.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think you'll use them in different ways?

Phil: No. They seem to fulfill the same function. Twitter, it used to be I'd get up in the morning and read The New York Times, but some years ago, I started instead reading Twitter because if Maggie Haberman had written something, she'd post it on Twitter, but now Twitter as a news source is much less valuable. Threads is valuable, so I probably will use Threads a lot more.

Brian Lehrer: Phil, thanks so much for checking in. Sam in Manhattan has downloaded Threads. Sam, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Sam: Hi. Thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think?

Sam: Immediately when I downloaded Threads, because I just hopped on the hype train, the first post that I saw was from this guy named Gary V, who talks a lot about financials, but he's also basically a right-wing propagandist as well. I continued scrolling before I even followed anyone, and I was still being inundated with right-wing propaganda when I heavily monitor and edit who appears in Instagram feed, and I mute words, I edit words-- or mute words and mute other phrases, and I do the same thing on Twitter, so I've been able to kind of self-censor some things and not have them appear on my Twitter feed, but then as soon as I downloaded Threads, I was being inundated with this right-wing propaganda again, and I immediately deleted the app. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: How does that compare to your experience with Twitter?

Sam: Well, Twitter has been similar because there has been so much right-wing propaganda forced onto the For You page. I would say especially now that Elon has taken over, there's far less control over words that I've muted or accounts that I've blocked, I still see some of that content on Twitter, but seeing that same right-wing propaganda on Threads made me very disappointed especially when it was being promoted to be this very, very positive, much different from Twitter space for people to express their opinions and stuff. Also just something that the last caller had--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead.

Sam: Something that the last caller had mentioned is that Instagram has verification and Twitter allows you to buy verification. Recently, Instagram implemented that same rule, so I think for even more money than Twitter, you can pay to be verified on Instagram and on Meta, and on those other platforms.

Brian Lehrer: Sam, thank you very much. Well, pretty different experiences from those two callers, Mike.

Mike Isaac: Yes. I thought it was super interesting. I think the verification point is really good because it's fascinating that Elon Musk basically changed what being verified on social networks means overnight, basically. Back in the day, Twitter started it and having a blue check mark meant you were influential in some form or you knew a Twitter person at the company and got a backdoor into being verified. It was an imperfect system, but at least it meant something in some sense.

Basically, it said you were who you said you were. Now, as your caller said, it means you have $8 in your wallet and you can pay to be verified, and it's really flipped the switch on who gets seen, whose replies appear at the top of posts. For me at least, a lot of the ones I'm seeing are just not as entertaining or funny or interesting as the past, and it's kind of a pay-to-play scheme that I think can be bad for social networks over time.

I agree with your last caller that Instagram also you can start paying to be verified in some regions. I do think they have an advantage though, in that their algorithm still favors more posts from verified folks who are more, let's say, interesting or more engaged with over time. Maybe it will be less bland or negative replies up at the top, but it's early days, I think people are still figuring out what they want out of this thing and if they want to stick around.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "One of the annoying things I found about Threads is that when you search, it seems to only search account names, not hashtags or subjects, et cetera, that's a big negative at this point." Is that true? Is it really the case that you can't search a subject or a hashtag on Threads? That's certainly one of the ways that I use Twitter.

Mike Isaac: Yes. This has been super interesting as they have launched this app. I think part of it is they literally rushed this out the door. They were supposed to launch it later, I believe, in July, and saw this opportunity with Musk when he-- I don't know if you remember a few weeks ago, what he did was rate limiting and made the site unusable for basically all of 4th of July weekend and Zuckerberg sped up the launch and that meant pushing the thing out the door without a lot of features that people might want.

I also think it serves another purpose in that it makes it harder to find objectionable content. If I immediately start searching for, like your last caller was saying, right-wing content that he might not want to see or he might find objectionable, you can start getting it bombarding in your search results or something like that, or follow hashtags that don't work on there, but some hashtags have been abused over time and used to harass people. I think they've actually intentionally done some of this to keep it from getting gnarly right off the bat.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Joseph in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joseph.

Joseph: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me on. I recently joined Threads and I'm enjoying it. I'm an artist and I post my work and I've been quickly able to find other artists, get feedback, and I--

Brian Lehrer: Oops, did we lose-- I think Joseph needs old technology, a telephone that works, but okay, found an artist community, that's okay. Are you still there, Mike, just checking your line.

Mike Isaac: Yes, I'm here.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, so that was just him. Here's another text that says, "I admit I haven't looked into it, but I am wary of Threads because it's part of Facebook and Facebook is awful for privacy." Another one similar-- Sorry, these texts are going by pretty fast. Well, I'm going to summarize. It said something like if Zuck is morally superior to Musk, then we're in a world of hurt.

I imagine that a lot of our listeners who've encouraged us to stop using Twitter on the show and we decided to stay on it, but open other alternatives, like

we're taking text messages now for people who want to comment in writing that way, so people don't have to go on Twitter if they want to communicate with us in real-time in writing during the show. For a lot of those people who are fed up with Twitter because of various things that Elon Musk stands for, I don't know, yes, really, Mark Zuckerberg's platform, is he so much better?

Mike Isaac: I think this whole thing has been a real gift to Mark Zuckerberg from a communications and PR standpoint that I haven't seen in a long time. He's basically rehabbing his own personal image in real-time. I think it's good to remember, there's still a lot of reasons folks have been critical of Facebook over the years, they still have a lot of problems. Their content moderation, they have a bigger budget than Twitter's, for sure, which is basically non-existent at this point, but that's still a huge issue for them.

Folks are worried that Facebook puts us in little echo chambers that can maybe polarize us more, so all of the things that people worry about about Facebook have not gone away just because they don't like Elon Musk. I do think it probably speaks to people connecting with each other on some level and are still seeking for what is an acceptable version of that to them. That's why the internet to me and the social internet feels up for grabs in a way that it hasn't been in a long time. I'm curious if people go back to Zuckerberg or find one of these smaller social networks like you mentioned at the beginning.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, do you have any early reason to think that Threads will be any more immune to disinformation in the 2024 election cycle than Twitter because it does seem like Elon Musk is opening the spigot in that regard?

Mike Isaac: Launching Threads now in the run-up to very contentious election is a risk, and I think it's a risk that Facebook, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg are opening themselves up to, especially after a bunch of rough years. Again, I do think their content moderation budget is bigger. I think the one thing they have going for them is this algorithmic discovery rather than seeing what's called reverse chronological every post in your feed like Twitter, they can at least decide which ones to promote and which ones to not.

They're a bit smarter on rooting out some keywords and speech compared to Twitter, at least, that is kind of a low bar, but they have more tools at their disposal to herd it, to prevent it. I still think it's a good question, it's pretty risky and we're going to have to watch and see if they can improve this very quickly as this thing grows like a weed basically.

Brian Lehrer: Mike Isaac covers tech for The New York Times. Latest article, Why the Early Threads Success May Crash Into Reality, and he's got a few more articles on Threads in the last few days. Mike, thanks again for coming on with us, really appreciate it.

Mike Isaac: Thanks, Brian, always a pleasure.

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