LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyIn this episode of Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss Threads as it recently hit 500 million monthly users, putting it on par with X—but is it really competing, or just filling a different niche? Meanwhile, the reviews have been coming in for the Trump-branded T1 phone in recent weeks as it finally started shipping after a year of delays. Plus: We explain the fast-moving crisis around Senate candidate Graham Platner, who is stepping down after a long string of controversies.
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Zoë Schiffer: It’s great. Brian is gone. When the cat is away, the mice will not be talking about any tech conferences.
Leah Feiger: We’re talking about a gadget, but it’s—
Leah Feiger: It’s one we care about. It’s a gadget we care about.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.
Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we’re discussing how Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, has been silently growing and actually catching up to its rival. Last month, Threads reached 500 million monthly users, making it as popular as Elon Musk’s social platform. Truly caught me by surprise. We’ll discuss what this milestone means in a landscape that’s increasingly obsessed with AI products.
Leah Feiger: We’ll also be diving into the Trump phone. The one that was announced a year ago, delayed quite a few times, and now apparently the place orders have finally been arriving over the past few weeks. The phone’s features are exactly what you would expect. Then, we’ll be turning our attention to the political debacle happening in Maine. Democratic nominee Graham Platner is facing allegations of sexual abuse and numerous calls to step down.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, Leah, let’s dive in to Meta’s Threads first. If you have an Instagram account, you’ve definitely seen it. The app is constantly being promoted in the main feed. And just to catch people up who aren’t aware, it looks a lot like X, like Twitter. And that is the point. Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, turned it into X, and Meta basically saw a wide open field because people were so upset with how Elon Musk was running that platform. And so, they created Threads as a direct competitor. When it first launched, it got a ton of press. I was part of that press. I was heralding it, embarrassingly as the new, next, better Twitter. But then it just had this kind of overly moderated LinkedIn feel, at least to me, and it seemed like many others. And so, it feels like it’s dropped off the map a little bit. But then Meta announces, wait, no, 500 million monthly users putting it on par with X.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I love this for so many reasons, which is of course Meta kind of accidentally lucked into a product that people are actually using in a consistent way.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes, and if you have distribution, there is just so much you can do. It’s a little bit too big to fail in some ways because if you have an app like Instagram and you’re just forcing Threads on everyone, which is what they were doing, at the very beginning, you couldn’t delete Threads without also deleting your Instagram account, which is so nuts. So yeah, you can get a fair amount of adoption. And it does look like the app now operates a little more like Reddit. It’s like these very specific conversations. People are on there talking about heated rivalry or K-pop or whatever, and it’s supposed to be a nicer place to discuss stuff.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. And I think that’s 100 percent right. Back to the Zuckerberg of it all, he said that it’s not their massive priority. It’s not their massive project. Like you mentioned, they’re way more all in on their AI projects at the moment, but you can’t overemphasize enough the vertical integration of it all. Of course, there is already an app that people are using and this is so next door to it. This is the sibling. This is like, not even a different login, barely a click out. And also managed to take kind of a piece of pie of communities that were probably not that active on X or former iteration of Twitter to begin with.
Leah Feiger: Like you said, the Reddit of it all. I’m actually very fascinated by where Threads is now. When it gets sold to me in my algorithm, it’s a lot of people complaining about airport travel experiences—
Zoë Schiffer: I was going to say customer service issues.
Leah Feiger: It’s a lot of customer service issues, which brings me back to Twitter 1.0. But like you said, all of these niche communities that there is something to be said about I am vaguely impressed at this product. Of course, too big to fail, but this product build a niche.
Zoë Schiffer: And I think you make a really good point, which is that it’s not like we saw finance Twitter or sports Twitter or politics Twitter migrate over to Threads, all contrary. It’s much more specific cultural conversations. Those conversations of course, take place on Threads, but overwhelmingly something different is happening over there. And I think that to me was what I was looking at, at the beginning. I kept thinking to myself, if we see finance Twitter migrate to Threads, then I think X, Elon Musk’s platform has a real problem. But that just didn’t seem to happen despite the fact that at the beginning, Meta was spending a ton of resources trying to court big name, sports journalists on the platform, trying to lean in a little bit more to breaking news. But because they didn’t want to be a news first platform and certainly not a political platform, it just never really took off.
Leah Feiger: OK. I do have a question though. When they’re talking about their many millions of monthly users, do I count in that category?
Leah Feiger: Like I have an account. I don’t post. I every once in a while, click on a little thing that takes me from Instagram on over because I do want to see what Karen in seat 5E did when confronted with a screaming toddler. But I wouldn’t consider myself an active user at all. Should we be skeptical a little?
Zoë Schiffer: I think we should be skeptical. Yeah. We don’t really have the full picture. It does seem like the app is growing, but it’s unclear right now how many of those 500 million monthly users are actually active users, like you said. I mean, some of them are doubtless bots. The company’s full picture will probably be a little more available once they release revenue data. And until then, I think we don’t know.
Leah Feiger: All right. I want to talk about a different product that I will be watching so closely, the Trump phone.
Archival audio: Well, good morning everyone—
Leah Feiger: Last summer at a glitzy event at Trump Tower, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, President Trump’s sons, announced the launch of a new "All-American cell phone."
Archival audio: And today we’re here to introduce Trump Mobile.
Leah Feiger: The T1 phone priced at $499 apparently received $100 deposits from an estimated 600,000 people, which should we be skeptical of those numbers too? Maybe, maybe so. This was all slated to launch in August 2025 and then, it just kind of went away and we never really heard about this again for many months. It did not launch by the plan date. They pushed it to the winter, then they pushed it again. But earlier this year, Trump Mobile confirmed that orders would start shipping soon. And now, apparently some orders have been trickling in. Zoë, have you heard about this? Do you know anyone who has a Trump phone?
Zoë Schiffer: Certainly not. Certainly not, where a lot of KQED listeners in my corner. However, I have been reading from the people who have received the phone. It really seems like it’s a basic Android device with Truth Social preinstalled.
Zoë Schiffer: Ironically, I was listening to the Verge folks, and this is their bread and butter, talk about this and they were like, “It’s kind of the phone that a lot of hardcore Android users have been asking for, for years because it is so simple in certain ways. It has the core features and not a lot of other bells and whistles.” But I think for a lot of people, it looked tacky, it looked cheap. There’s this ugly blue background that is preinstalled and not a lot else going on.
Leah Feiger: There’s an American flag at the bottom.
Leah Feiger: And it’s the size of your hand. This isn’t the smartphone, this isn’t subtle. No shade to anyone who bought this when we were in middle school. But for whatever reason, it’s really giving me the iPod vibes when U2 and Bono launched that whole thing where all of their music was already prerecorded on it and people were like, “Yeah, I will absolutely pay several hundred dollars more. This is an incredible investment.” What you get here is Truth Social preinstalled. And then of course, there’s been the whole Trump mobile situation, which is messy.
Zoë Schiffer: Right. And that’s the real thing here because the hardware device is whatever. It doesn’t seem like this is the main thing they are doing. Again, I’m cribbing from what the Verge folks were talking about, but they made a very good point, which you just simply can’t expect there to be many a software update on this phone. You’re getting the phone. And do they plan to update that phone? TBD, but probably not. But Trump Mobile is the play here, and that is basically just built on top of the T-Mobile network, right?
Leah Feiger: Right. Exactly. Exactly. They did not specify how or where these phones are going to get made. All of their deposit terms and conditions are incredibly messy. This was supposed to be only made in America. They’ve dropped that claim. Will there be a live big rollout? Will 600,000 people be receiving these phones? I think that there’s a lot more messiness to come. And in some ways, this just frankly comes from having to run a business with a physical item attached, right? The Trump sons being involved in the crypto biz or getting involved in Polymarket. That’s not tangible in the exact same way. People need to literally hold this in their hands.
Zoë Schiffer: But I think in some ways it’s all an influencer play. They’re just slapping their names on all sorts of things and making money. And we have recently found out how much money, and it’s billions of dollars that Trump has made since he’s been in office the second time. So yeah, it appears to be working. They are able to leverage that family name regardless if the products that they are slapping those names onto even work.
Leah Feiger: I’m perhaps most curious for what happens 10 years from now. What are these guys hawking next? I’m envisioning self-whitening toothpaste.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I think we’re going the supplements route.
Leah Feiger: I can’t wait to discuss. Can we talk about the political scandal of the week? It is the core of my group chats. It is everything I’m thinking about when it comes to the midterms. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, Zoë, because you’ve been the recipient of some of these chats. Graham Platner, he is currently, as of this recording, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Maine, running against longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins. He is currently facing many, many calls from across the Democratic Party to end his Senate bid following an allegation of sexual assault. On Monday, Politico reported that a woman who had an on-and-off relationship with Platner said that back in 2021, he entered her home intoxicated and forced her to have sex over her repeated objections. This happened in Maine. Platner has denied these accusations, and it’s really sad. That’s ultimately to me the thing that I want to very much focus on here is that the person who accused him, she went on the record, her name is out there, her photo is out there, her video is out there. She said very specifically that she didn’t actually want to go on the record. She didn’t want to put her name out there, but felt that she had no choice, because even as Platner has faced a long string of controversies, none of them have knocked him down. And she was like, “I got to. I have no other choice,” which is devastating. I mean, can we go through the laundry list just a little bit? I feel like everyone is kind of inundated with Platner right now, but it’s important to make these lists, right? He had tons and tons of Reddit posts that were made between 2009 and 2021.
Archival audio: Platner, who’s drawing big crowds and raising big money is having to explain comments he made on Reddit years ago, comments that he reportedly deleted before making his Senate run.
Leah Feiger: Long range, including really insensitive comments about Black people, LGBTQ people. He had a tattoo that was a Nazi symbol.
Archival audio: Another controversy from Platner’s past resurfaced. When it was revealed that Platner had a Nazi linked symbol tattooed on his chest.
Leah Feiger: He had claimed for a period of time that he had no idea it was a Nazi symbol. Other people who know him have claimed differently and said that he absolutely knew and would talk about it. His campaign said that the tattoo got covered up kind of recently. It’s really just been nonstop.
Zoë Schiffer: Completely. So wait, just to make sure I understand, the tattoo, the Reddit comments, those things came out before he won the Democratic primary, right?
Leah Feiger: Yeah. Well before. Well, well before. And something that I have talked a lot about with our senior director of politics, security, and science, Tim Marchman, is he got a lot of cover from Democrats and a lot of cover from progressive wings of the party. Tim and I were at an event where an official quite literally said to us, “He’s progressive. At least this is our option. This is better than Collins. It’s a vote against Trump.” And these are people that are saying this after all of this information is coming out, I find it very disconcerting. And finally though, after this political article, plenty of Democratic leaders have asked him to step down. Chuck Schumer has asked him to step down. Bernie Sanders, who was a big Platner supporter, said he should step aside. So did Elizabeth Warren. Ro Khanna, who has literally gone to campaign for him, said the same thing. We’re in this kind of tricky timeline period. We’re recording right now and it is Wednesday, July 8. Democrats have less than a week for him to drop out so that they can start the process of nominating someone else. We’ve talked to people in the state of Maine, in the Democratic Party who say that they would like to spend the weekend of July 25 making that happen, an open nomination process, an open primary process yet again. But this all has to be sorted by July 27. Maine is in crunch time, and I’m very curious how this is going to actually play out.
Zoë Schiffer: Is the reporting accurate though that he’s dragging his feet because he wants a say in who the successor might be?
Leah Feiger: That’s what’s come out a bit from his campaign, which is, I’m sorry, so wild for so many reasons. You can feel however you want about these accusations. You can feel however you want about this man, about the state of Maine, about midterms in general. But it feels like a pretty logical throughline that if you perhaps want a Democratic candidate elected in Maine, the Democratic candidate who is likely about to step down in shame should probably not be linked to this successor, if you want to have a chance in the general election whatsoever. Especially because ... and this is the part that I’m truly mind-blown over here. Susan Collins is really popular in this state. Last election, she won pretty handily. She has so many different parts of the Maine populace locked up. I haven’t seen a ton of national reporting on this, but there’s some great stuff from the Portland Press Herald and the Maine Monitor, specifically talking about her relationships with different unions, which is something that Platner claimed to offer. But her relationships, for example, with Bath Ironworks, which is one of the largest employers in the states and makes many of the US’s battleships, this is already going to be an uphill battle for whoever it was and the fact that the DNC has managed to make this literally as messy as possible. I think that there ... yeah, it has to be a bit of a reckoning about how this happened. This is arguably ... if this is not the most important Senate election in the country, I would say that Republicans probably think it’s the most important Senate election in the country. It’s certainly in the top three.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. It was fact-checked by Daniel Roman. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Mark Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our senior digital production manager. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.
