Joe Biden arriving to pardon the National Thanksgiving turkeys on November 20, 2023. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
US President Joe Biden signed up for a Threads account today, as did the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff.
Biden’s first post on Meta’s X (formerly Twitter) competitor harkens back to his 2020 presidential victory speech with references to the country’s divisions and its current “inflection point.” Harris gestured to her travels throughout the US and her having met “over 100” world leaders, and Emhoff wrote about gender equity and “countering hate of all kinds.”
Meanwhile, the White House wrote, “The wait is Joe-ver.” Yes, I suppose it is. Former President Obama also posted a birthday message to Biden on Threads today.
Biden and company signing up is a good sign for the platform. Before its name change, Twitter had far fewer regular users than bigger platforms like Facebook. But it tended to draw influential people of all stripes, including political leaders. Biden joining doesn’t mean Threads will become a 1:1 replacement for the Twitter that was, but it may indicate that it has potential as a news source — whether it wants that or not.
According to a statement provided to Axios, the new Biden administration accounts don’t preclude their participation on Elon Musk’s platform. Even so, X’s struggles to retain advertisers have gotten worse in the last week as heavy advertisers, including Apple and the European Commission, abruptly left following a Media Matters report that highlighted hate speech on the platform Musk’s apparent support of it.
