Meta’s Threads is introducing a new feature called “ghost posts,” which allows content to disappear after 24 hours. This feature is available to the app’s more than 400 million monthly users worldwide starting on Monday.
To create a ghost post on a mobile device, users can toggle on the new ghost icon found on the app’s compose screen. Once published, these posts appear in timelines with a distinctive dotted conversation bubble to set them apart from regular content.
Other users on both desktop and mobile can reply to a ghost post, but their responses are sent directly to the original poster’s direct messages and do not appear in the public timeline. Underneath the post, people can see if others have engaged with it through smiley-faced icons that indicate likes and replies. However, only the original poster can see the exact number of likes and replies, as well as the identities of the people who engaged.
After 24 hours, the ghost posts vanish from the public timeline. They are then moved to an archived section, which the original poster can access from the main settings menu. If a user has turned off message requests, people they do not follow will be unable to reply to their ghost posts. If message requests are enabled, replies from people not followed will go to the message request inbox. These settings can be adjusted from the drop-down menu in the top right of a user’s profile.
According to parent company Meta, this feature was designed to encourage more low-stakes sharing within the feed. This addition also provides Threads with a new way to compete with X, where users often need third-party, sometimes paid, services to automatically delete old posts.
This is not the first time a text-based social network has tried ephemeral posts. Before it became X, Twitter experimented with a similar feature called Fleets in 2020, which appeared as disappearing Stories. The company removed the feature the following year due to a lack of user adoption.
Meta believes there is still potential for disappearing content, a format that has proven successful with Stories on Instagram and Facebook. The company expects that on Threads, people will feel encouraged to share more unfiltered thoughts, engage in live conversations, or experiment with other types of content through ghost posts.
Since its launch in July 2023, the tech giant has been rapidly updating Threads with new features. These include custom feeds, direct messages, fediverse sharing that connects Threads to open social networks like Mastodon, and support for up to 10,000 characters through text attachments. More recent additions include tools to hide spoilers and the launch of interest-based communities.