Trending topics feature may be coming to the Threads app

Meta’s Threads app, the social media platform that rivals X (formerly Twitter), may get a trending topics section. The potential new feature has come to light after an app developer reposted screenshots of the feature in use that were originally shared by a Meta employee.

The developer that reposted the screenshots, William Max, said that, “Just to be clear: I'm not a “leaker” or anything like that,” in a post. He continued, “I simply follow many engineers and employees working at Meta, and one of them accidentally posted a screenshot that was meant to be private. Fortunately for us, I happened to see it at the right moment. I will not disclose who posted the screenshot for obvious reasons.”

One user, @eddygraphic1, commented, “Is this a concept or real screenshot?” The employee, @willianmax, replied, “It’s real. An employee just posted by accident. 🤫” Another, @brian.g.holm said, “Please god, let this be real, AND SOON.” Max responded, “It’s real. I just don’t know if it’s coming soon (probably not).”

In the screenshots, the feature appears to list trending topics according to the number of threads it received. However, the topics don't appear to necessarily rank from most popular to least. For example, Drake’s new hit “For All the Dogs” ranked first with 59.4K threads while “Loki Season 2” which had 91K threads, got slotted in fourth. So it's not exactly clear how the rankings are listed.

According to the screenshots, the trending topics were showcased near the search tab. A trending tool seems like a straightforward embed for any social media app that thrives off of user-generated content. However, it's for that very reason that trending topics can be a bit problematic. In the past, similar tools have been a place for messy contention on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In 2018, Facebook killed its trending topics feature due to controversy over it repeatedly resurfacing conspiracy theories and misinformation. Meanwhile, X notoriously had to deal with bots that spammed the trending section with specific agendas.

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