How it works
A user can share a Thread post containing text, pictures, videos, links or their location. They can like, share or reply to other people’s threads, follow or tag other users and share a poll (a multiple-choice question).
Threads has different feeds (pages) that a user can follow, such as ‘Following’ which shows content only from people the user follows and ‘Liked’ which shows all the posts the person has liked.
The ‘For you’ feed is a page that is personal to each user and shows popular content, threads from people the user follows or threads related to content the person has liked, shared or replied to in the past. A user can also ‘Create new feed’ to only see content on specific topics (e.g. football) or from particular accounts. Direct messaging is not available to under 18s, so young users message each other through Instagram.
Public accounts which are 18+ can connect to the ‘fediverse’. The fediverse is a network of social apps that are interconnected, and on Threads this means users’ public posts can be seen, liked and replied to by people using other social apps like Mastodon. An adult user can remove adverts from their Threads experience (and prevent their data being used for advertising) by paying a monthly fee via their Instagram account.
Parental controls or safety settings available
Under 18 accounts have some stronger safety settings by default, including seeing less sensitive content (e.g. violence). They are automatically set to private, so that only their followers can see their threads or people they are replying to (although other people can still see a private account’s profile photo, name, username and description). Under 16s cannot make their account public unless their parent approves.
Parental supervision for under 18s on Threads is managed through the Instagram Family Centre. Using this feature, parents can:
• View time spent on Instagram and Threads
• Set a daily time limit and ‘sleep mode’ (when notifications are muted)
• View who their child is following or being followed by
• View who they have blocked
Privacy settings include the ability to prevent other people from seeing when you are online or mentioning your account name, hiding ‘like’ and ‘share’ counts or preventing content containing certain words, are managed via Instagram settings.
