Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri Rules Out Chronological Search Feature Due to Bad Actors

Threads made a huge impact when it was launched on July 6, quickly gaining 100 million users in just 5 days. However, the platform has faced challenges since then, experiencing a decline in user engagement and traffic due to competition from Elon Musk’s X. In an effort to regain momentum, Meta has been introducing various new features on Threads, such as keyword search. Nevertheless, Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, recently disclosed that Threads will not have a feature that X already possesses – chronological search. Here’s the reason behind this decision.

Why don’t threads get chronological search?

Just a few days ago, Mosseri announced on Threads the worldwide introduction of keyword search on the platform. Under the post, the user asked the Instagram boss if the chronological search was also running. “Are there any plans to allow search results to be ordered chronologically (such as showing the most recent threads first)?” a user asked Mosser, to which he replied that it would not be allowed on the platform because it “would create a significant security loophole.”

A few days later, Mosseri further clarified that allowing chronological search on Threads would open up the platform to spammers and “other bad actors.” In a later post, Mosseri explained: “Importantly listing *every* post with a particular word in chronological order inevitably means that spammers and other bad actors are hitting the scene with content simply by adding the relevant words or tags. And before you ask why we don’t remove that bad content , understand that there is a lot more content that people don’t want to see than we can or should remove.”

The Instagram boss revealed that the search products need some ranking to avoid being overrun by spammers and bad actors. “You can show the results in chronological order, but then you have to leave out the bad content that doesn’t have a quote over the line and it’s eligible for removal,” Mosseri further explained.

So basically, you shouldn’t expect chronological search to arrive anytime soon. However, Mosseri also suggested that they haven’t worked on improving the search, and they need time to figure out how to make it work for real-time events. In the meantime, you can already take advantage of Threads’ keyword search feature, and more improvements are expected soon.