Meta’s new social media app, Threads, aims to rival Twitter by promising a more sanitised and ‘friendly’ user experience. However, critics fear it’s just another step towards increased censorship and a return to the pre-Musk era of limited free speech. Spiked has the story.
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year, the people formerly known as ‘blue ticks’ have been threatening to flounce off. Twitter, they say, has become an unusable hellhole, rife with disinformation and proto-fascist hate speech. A great Twitter exodus has been promised once every few months, yet still they have carried on tweeting.
Why did so few of them ever leave Twitter? The main barrier has been the lack of a viable alternative. Twitter, for good or ill, has remained the world’s public square. But that could be about to change. This week, Threads, the new social-media app from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, was launched to huge fanfare. It has been explicitly pitched as a rival to Twitter. Within the first 24 hours of its launch, 30 million users are said to have signed up.
Threads is effectively a clone of Twitter. It is a ‘text-based social app’ or ‘microblogging service’. As with Twitter, posts on Threads have strict character limits. Twitter’s retweet function has become ‘repost’ and quote tweets have become ‘quote threads’. Even the name Threads seems to be a nod to a ‘Twitter thread’ – a connected series of tweets, posted by the same Twitter user, to get around the character limit.
The similarities between the two rival apps are so stark and so noticeable that Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta. Meta has hardly tried to hide the similarities, either. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in over a decade. It was of the Spiderman meme – where two men in exactly the same Spiderman outfit point at each other, unable to tell the real thing from the imposter. Besides, ripoffs of other platforms are not unknown at Meta. For instance, Instagram Stories are a shameless copy of Snapchat, while Instagram’s Reels feature is an obvious imitation of TikTok.
So, with all its similarities to Twitter, why would anyone feel the need to move over to Threads? The main draw for the great and the good is that Threads is promising a more sanitised social-media experience. This is what Zuckerberg rather creepily refers to as its commitment to ‘friendliness’. “We are definitely focussing on kindness and making this a friendly space”, Zuckerberg said in response to an early Threads user this week. “The goal is to keep [Threads] friendly as it expands”, he explained to another. …
Of course, the only way to maintain such ‘friendliness’ is through censorship; through the harsh application of rules, community guidance and codes of conduct. This means the deletion or downgrading of posts that are seen as unkind or unfriendly. Indeed, on Threads’ first day of operations, users already reported having their posts taken down, mainly for political reasons. Some accounts say they are being blacklisted or greylisted. When you try to follow a ‘problematic’ person on Threads, you might be warned that their account has ‘posted false information’ or has violated ‘community guidelines’. Censorship techniques that have been honed by Meta on Facebook and Instagram are already being zealously deployed on Threads.
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Some terrible stories. It just adds to my disrespect for the police and judiciary.
Nobody who had not lived through the past 25-30 years of British politics could imagine any of this. Each of the three reports describe disgraceful public services and suffering by the people.
Past monarchs have been displaced and killed for less.
if the current situation persists we will be in for a tough time. More likely it will get worse. The implications of it getting worse may result in a government very different from anything we have known and it might not be pleasant.
I am not confident of outliving this terror.
We quite literally live in a police state.
I wish I could say I am shocked or surprised but I cannot. But if Starmer and his gang think they can get away with this they have another think coming. And I hold the Tories and LibDems equally responsible because they been quietly or not so quietly acquiescent in the loss of our freedoms over the last 25/30 years, most particularly freedom of speech. Contrary to the will of most of the electorate.
The real problems for the government will come in the new year when cold weather will inevitably lead to power cuts and the trial of the Southport killer will lead to some interesting revelations. This is a one term government and better still the last Labour government ever to be elected.