Pamela Paul, writing in an opinion-editorial for The New York Times:

And now, after a mere 10 months, we can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind.

Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou. It knows, for example, exactly where — on the left, bien sûr — you stand with regard to the Middle East, gender ideology, D.E.I., body positivity, neurodivergence, Covid and the creative industries and shows you posts screaming from whichever position is just far enough from your own to drive you out of your mind.

In this microverse, arguments you probably didn’t know existed (“Every time I see a white person in a kaffiyeh, I wonder: How much have you studied the issue?”) devolve into accusations around tokenism, solidarity and identity. There is something guaranteed to offend anyone who wants to get offended — or your money back. Confessions of emotional upheaval and mental health crises operate like a kind of currency, a surefire way to accrue cred.

Paul, like most Times columnists, is an idiot. The best phrase that I can use to describe what Paul is facing here is “platform virtue signaling,” a term which I’d like to now coin. Every platform — aside from the ones that don’t have algorithms, such as Mastodon — virtue signals in some way to feature the ideology its creators are biased toward. That is how algorithms work — it’s why ChatGPT is left-leaning and why telling Siri “All Lives Matter” used to give you a lesson about how the phrase is racist (it is). People who work in Silicon Valley are left-leaning — it’s no secret — and the platforms those people make are emblematic of those biases.

One exception since 2023 has been the social media website X, which, when it was called Twitter, used to be a left-leaning source of information. Up until Elon Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX who has made it a goal of his to elect Republicans this year, acquired the platform, Twitter censored right-wing nuts, added disclaimers to misleading tweets that were almost always from right-leaning, and served users tweets from leftists most of the time unless they explicitly followed right-wingers. But since Musk meddled with the algorithm and “relaxed” content moderation criteria, the algorithm has taken a sharp turn to the right — again, emblematic of the creators’ biases.

While you might not notice this on your “For You” feed if you lean to the left, it’s painfully obvious once you delve into a trend on the Explore page. Any trend is instantly inundated with right-wingers posting bombastic conspiracy theories, very few of which have Community Notes on them. It’s difficult to find left-wing discourse on current events on X these days — most trends are filled with commentary from the likes of Catturd, an ardent Make America Great Again follower, and Musk himself. This never used to be the case on Twitter; to find right-wing opinions on the platform, you would often have to dig deep into fringe replies on threads from leftists.

Most of this isn’t actually due to any substantiative algorithmic changes, but because Musk’s X now prioritizes subscribers of the platform’s Premium and Premium+ services, who are almost always followers of Musk. Whenever you open a post on X, blue check-bearing accounts take the top spot, making it almost certain that you’ll be faced with wingnuts first.

But this isn’t even the point: Because X now prioritizes replies from people who subscribe to X Premium, anyone — including those on the left — can pay for a boost in engagement. Many progressive leftists do exactly this to get their point across because, like rightists, their ideas are woefully unpopular amongst the public. They need the extra engagement to stay relevant because their watermelon ideas aren’t the most intelligent nor captivating. And as I said earlier, the “For You” feed prioritizes what you like the most, so if you’re a left-leaning Democrat or independent with moderate views on the Middle East, you’ll be inundated with “from the river to the sea” watermelons — not Zionists.

Again, this changes on the Explore page because it isn’t bespoke in the way the “For You” timeline is, but your main algorithmic feed on X as a leftist will be full of fringe, unpopular, frankly insane ideas from progressives. I’d assume this is the same (but on the opposite side of the spectrum) for people who lean to the right but aren’t full-blown MAGA nut jobs, but I have no way of telling because I mostly post leftist ideas.

This makes X an extremely uncomfortable, polarizing place. People, even on the internet, want to “fit in” with the crowd, so if they have no opinions on the Middle East but do have opinions on socialized health care, for example, they will find many fringe leftists showing support for Hamas or other Islamic terrorist organizations and will be cocooned into a bubble that only supports Palestinians. They might like one or two moderate posts, but that will just throw them into the chaos more as the X algorithm feeds them more posts from blue check-holding fringe left-wing nuts.

X is an extremely polarizing, junk-filled social network, and if you spend any longer than 15 minutes on it, you’ll feel frankly disgusted. You can feel your political opinions becoming more extreme against your will. While I’ve heard, and sometimes agree, with the arguments saying that ideological diversity in social network feeds is important, this is the very opposite of diversity, making moderates either far right or far left — and nowhere in between. Soon, those brainwashed people — many who are younger, like myself — will also begin quote-posting fringe accounts, and the cycle continues.

But of course, back to Paul’s column, which misses this point entirely: Threads, made by Meta’s Instagram, is not a place for intellectual discussion. While X gives way to fringe left- and right-wing nuts because it promotes real-time news conversation — a relic of the former Twitter — Threads sharply veers away from any kind of news conversation. Earlier in March, Instagram and Threads began filtering “political” content from the “For You” feeds automatically, with an option to turn off filtering buried in the Instagram application if users explicitly chose to view political content. While radical leftists on X cooked up conspiracy theories that because Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, is Jewish, he wanted to silence pro-Palestine views, Meta’s content chiefs said it was because they didn’t want to be involved with political content anymore.

This dissolution of politics from the world’s largest social media company is incredibly dangerous during an election year but also makes the platforms useless for any kind of discussion that requires social skills or historical knowledge. Threads is filled with the most non-intellectually stimulating, boring, screenshotted content which makes it feel just like Instagram, a platform used by some of the dumbest people with internet access. Twitter used to feel intelligent — Threads does not.

Even if you follow many people — I follow over 150 — you’ll find that your timeline is filled with the most mundane, boring, “viral” content. For instance, when Threads rolled out a feature to view trending topics similar to X earlier in March, the top trending phrase was “Spring Equinox,” complete with a flower emoji. It’s truly the most bottom-level, boring content to exist on a social network. Observing what’s trending on Threads doesn’t make you feel like the platform is feeding you a political ideology — let alone a progressive one like Paul claims — it just makes you feel cheap. “Is this really what I’m doing with my time?”

The more time you spend on Threads, you feel like the platform is increasingly out of touch with our world climate. Sure, X is filled with neo-Nazis, terrorist sympathizers, communists, and fascists, but Threads is filled with so-called “aggregator” accounts posting heavily compressed screenshots of old tweets. You know these tweets are old because they still feature the old Twitter interface, with the old blue check marks, fonts, and icons. Many of these tweets, I’ll admit, are funny and relatable, and that is exactly why they go viral on Threads, sometimes gaining tens of thousands of likes. But Threads doesn’t even give politics or world events the chance to go viral — the only political content I see garner attraction is threads from President Biden and his campaign accounts.

On Threads, you’ll find most of your time is occupied by looking at badly edited photographs of sunsets from anonymous aggregator meme accounts, mildly interesting Tumblr posts from 2015, or a life story about some writer’s husband who nobody has ever heard of. In other words, it’s Instagram. That is not to say the people on Threads are accustomed to Instagram — as I’ve said many times in the past, I think most daily users are Twitter expatriates — rather, the reason intellectual conversation doesn’t get bumped on Threads is that the algorithm is not conducive to it.

I quipped many months ago on Threads (I would’ve linked to the thread if Threads had even a moderately useful search feature) that the threads you spend the least time on get the least engagement, whereas quick fiery reactions to quote posts often get the most. Spending minutes crafting a thought about something burning and perhaps linking to a reputable news article to supplement your points will get perhaps two or three likes from your followers, but it will never be pushed out into the wider Threads world. However, posting a quick quip about someone’s life story will end up getting hundreds of likes — bonus points if you add an image and don’t use any profanity.

Because the algorithm operates like this, the people on Threads slowly get dumber and less sharp, and the quantity of thought-provoking posts falls off a cliff. Is that better than obscure political opinions on X? That’s up to you to decide. But, to Paul: Threads is easily the least combative social network — politically, that is. (Don’t dare besmirch Meta on Threads unless you want to have a bad afternoon.)