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Newsflash: Threads Is Not The Antidote To Twitter’s Disinformation [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-11

Those of us who took the July 4th week off returned to our desks to find social media in absolute disarray. Climate disinformer Elon Musk shot his climate disinformation and hate speech -filled platform in the foot by limiting the number of tweets that users can see per day, and Twitter’s desktop service has been plagued with outages . Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of the climate disinformation haven known as Facebook , launched the Twitter competitor Threads, which is just as much of a privacy nightmare as Instagram and Facebook. In response, Twitter threatened legal action against Meta for supposed “misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets.” Twitter’s user traffic is now decreasing, while over 100 million people have already signed up for Threads. In other words, it’s an absolute garbage fire out there on the billionaire-owned social media platforms!

Numerous right-wing disinformers have already begun spreading hate speech and false content on Threads and actively testing the platform’s content moderation, according to Media Matters for America and Bloomberg . Hateful users that have already opened Threads accounts include white nationalist Richard Spencer and Chaya Raichik, the creator of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate generator “Libs of TikTok.”

Unfortunately, experts don’t have high hopes for Threads’ content moderation. As the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s US Head of Research Melanie Smith told Bloomberg , “This is a social media app that is owned by Meta who have failed consistently in governing and moderating other platforms that they own.” Smith’s words are already ringing true, since Meta really doesn’t seem to be trying that hard to combat the spread of toxic content on Threads.

Last Friday, Matt Binder at Mashable reported that right-wing disinformers were complaining on Twitter that their Threads accounts had almost immediately been flagged for disinformation. “As Threads is so new and still so tightly connected to Instagram, it appears Meta used an account's existing reputation to inform Threads users of their history,” Binder writes. However, he goes on to explain that just two days after Threads’ launch, the warnings on the harmful accounts disappeared, and Meta Communications Director Andy Stone said that, at least in the case of Donald Trump Jr.’s account, the notice was placed in error. We are disappointed but not surprised to see Meta caving in so quickly to the slightest bit of pressure from right-wing disinformers, thereby inviting the very kinds of toxic content that made users and advertisers flee Twitter in droves.

This weak-willed reversal is not even the worst part, though. Meta is not even doing the bare minimum of extending its fact-checking program to Threads, Katie Paul at Reuters reported. According to Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai, the consolation prize for this massive decrease in protection against mis/disinformation is that any fact-checked Facebook or Instagram content that is also posted on Threads will carry over its “false” label. We have three words for you, Zuckerberg: Not. Good. Enough.

A third content moderation challenge on Threads comes from outside the platform itself. Meta aims to eventually make Threads part of the Fediverse , the decentralized network of servers that operate separately but can communicate with each other. As Katie Paul , Casey Newton , and Alex Stamos all pointed out, having accounts from non-Meta platforms interact with Threads users will add an extra layer of complexity to content moderation on Threads.

Meta is well aware of this potential issue. As it currently stands, Threads only shows posts from its own server, and the platform is still governed by Instagram’s community guidelines , according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri . In the future, though, “If an account or server, or if we find many accounts from a particular server, is found violating our rules then they would be blocked from accessing Threads, meaning that server's content would no longer appear on Threads and vice versa,” spokesperson Pai stated . Mosseri also explained that there is a way to block damaging types of content before they make it onto Threads. One can only hope that Meta will use this tool to prevent other servers’ climate mis- and disinformation from entering the platform.

So, what are climate disinformers saying about all this turmoil? Just like all the other right-wing trolls, known spreaders of climate disinformation like Michael Shellenberger and Paul Joseph Watson are using Twitter and YouTube , respectively, to decry Thread’s “censorship.”

Wailing about free speech and social media censorship is nothing new for conservatives, and the assertion that major social media platforms are muzzling right-wing users is far from true. A Media Matters study published this June confirmed that Facebook definitely isn’t censoring right-wing media pages, despite what conservatives like to claim. In reality, “right-leaning pages earned more total interactions than either left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2022.” The way things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised if the same ends up being true for Threads.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/11/2180471/-Newsflash-Threads-Is-Not-The-Antidote-To-Twitter-s-Disinformation

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