Threads has taken one more step toward becoming a replacement for what Twitter used to be. Meta-owned Threads is getting a feature that’ll display trending topics in its apps, starting today. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a post on Threads that the feature is initially rolling out to users in the U.S. Presumably, this’ll be made available to the rest of the world at a later date.
Mosseri’s post reads, “We’re rolling out the ‘trending now’ feature widely to people in the U.S. today—excited to offer an easy way to see what others are talking about on Threads. It’s available on the search page and in the For You Feed, so try it out and let us know what you think.”
Once you go to the Search tab in Threads, you should be able to see these trending topics. At the moment, Threads seems to be showing up to five trending topics at a time. This feature could help you discover popular topics and help Threads drive engagement, but at the same time, it has the potential to be controversial. Outrage drives engagement on social media sites, and trending topics is another feature that could fan controversial flames by driving more people to those topics. Threads has repeatedly tried to distance itself from news and political content, but features like trending topics are driven by those types of content.
Threads has been slowly gaining feature parity with X over the past year. The Meta-owned service recently added the ability to bookmark your favorite posts, edit your posts, use on the web, and save drafts in the app.