If there is one standout Threads meme, it’s: “This is Richard’s wife. He has passed.”
It’s not a joke from some clever user; it was a real, grieving widow who apparently logged onto her husband’s account back in December to announce that he’d died. Somehow, the post got picked up by the Threads algorithm, which showed it to thousands of strangers.
As of Wednesday, it had 18,000 likes and 1,800 comments.
(I reached out to Richard’s wife, but didn’t hear back. I wish her the best.)
Cross-posts from Instagram and Facebook are all over Threads
Threads — Meta’s answer to X — just celebrated its third anniversary. It’s slowly but surely built up a large user base. Meta says it has more than 500 million monthly active users — more than X. That count is certainly helped by Threads’ cross-promotion on Instagram and Facebook. Threads posts often appear in the Instagram app, encouraging people to click into them and download or open the separate Threads app. (Meta has said the percentage of daily active users who open the app directly instead of tapping into it from Instagram has grown over time, although they declined to share numbers.)
Aggressively cross-promoting from Instagram and Facebook is a great user-acquisition technique. But there’s another side of the coin that has created a strange culture on Threads: the feeling that half the people posting there don’t even know what app they’re on.
The option to cross-post from Facebook or Instagram is not turned on by default, and on Instagram, the option is buried a little deep in the settings. However, on Facebook, when you create a new post in the mobile app, the option to cross-post to Threads is a simple “On” tap of the Threads @ logo right at the bottom of the post. Once you tap it “On,” it stays on for subsequent posts. (You can always turn it off.)
Jocelyn Ramsey, a spokesperson for Meta, told Business Insider that it has recently added more friction to stop people from accidentally cross-posting.
It’s unclear how much Threads content is cross-posted; Meta doesn’t say. In my experience, the vast majority of posts I see on Threads are from engaged users who know where they are and are generally enjoying themselves.
But if I scroll a little, I almost always see at least a few posts that seem to be from someone who doesn’t realize they’re cross-posting to Threads. There are little tells like mentioning family members by name.
Because Threads’ algorithm is so personalized, it’s possible I see these unintended cross-posts more than other people. (I do tend to lurk around on there a lot.) But I can tell from engagement numbers that sometimes these clueless cross-posts go viral — it’s not just me seeing them.
Accidental posts have become part of the fabric of Threads culture.
The ‘gas leak’ social network
Less than a year after it launched, Max Read called Threads the “gas-leak social network” because, as he wrote, “Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage.” At the time, the issue wasn’t Instagram or Facebook cross-posting (which wasn’t yet enabled); it was that the kinds of people who gravitated to Threads often weren’t hardened capital-P Posters, those used to the fast pace and edge of old Twitter and X.
The people posting on Threads seemed like innocent babes, incapable of identifying sarcasm or shitposts. (I found it incredibly easy to ragebait on Threads.)
But now it’s not so much the gas leak — it’s the platform leak. It’s the people — typically older people who are less used to social media — who flipped on the toggle to crosspost and never check the Threads app.
We take for granted that text-mased social networks have all sorts of unspoken rules: Don’t post your address. Don’t post your phone number. Don’t post photos of your grandkids or of kids not fully clothed. That celebrity asking you for a gift card is probably not really the celebrity.
This isn’t really a problem on something like Bluesky or even on X, which typically has more experienced users. But Threads has so many Facebook and Instagram users — people with less experience navigating the choppy waters of algorithmic text-based social platforms. This creates a situation where there are Haves who understand social platform dynamics and Have-nots who don’t.
And one of the dominant forms of entertainment on Threads is to chuckle at the Have-nots.
As someone who understands how Threads works, I admit I’ve enjoyed the people-watching aspect of seeing the platform leak. But I have to imagine this is a terrible experience for the people caught in the crosshairs.
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