Last week, Meta started testing private messages on Threads, an option that, surprisingly for a social network, has not existed in the app since its launch last year. Since Friday, some users of Threads have started seeing a new option with the text “Message” on user profiles.
Discovered by user Chris Messina, the new private messaging option in Threads will basically allow you to send messages to users within the app. While this is expected in a feature like this, what’s surprising is that the messages will not be sent through Threads, but through Instagram.
For many users, it may come as a shock that Threads relies on Instagram to send private messages, but the company had already warned about it in the past. In November, after a series of hints in the code of Threads that hinted at the possible launch of private messages in the app, the director of Threads, Adam Mosseri, said that “Threads app is built on top of the Instagram app, which is probably why you are seeing [the lines of code related to private messages]”, and he concluded by saying: “We are not developing private messages in Threads”.
