Meta's 'friendly' Threads collides with unfriendly internet
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[July 08, 2023] By
Katie Paul
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Meta's Twitter copycat
app, Threads, as a "friendly" refuge for public discourse online,
framing it in sharp distinction to the more adversarial Twitter which is
owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
"We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly
place," Meta CEO Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, shortly after the
service's launch.
Maintaining that idealistic vision for Threads - which attracted more
than 70 million users in its first two days - is another story.
To be sure, Meta Platforms is no newbie at managing the rage-baiting,
smut-posting internet hordes. The company said it would hold users of
the new Threads app to the same rules it maintains on its photo and
video sharing social media service, Instagram.
The Facebook and Instagram owner also has been actively embracing an
algorithmic approach to serving up content, which gives it greater
control over the type of fare that does well as it tries to steer more
toward entertainment and away from news.
However, by hooking up Threads with other social media services like
Mastodon, and given the appeal of microblogging to news junkies,
politicians and other fans of rhetorical combat, Meta is also courting
fresh challenges with Threads and seeking to chart a new path through
them.
For starters, the company will not extend its existing fact-checking
program to Threads, spokesperson Christine Pai said in an emailed
statement on Thursday. This eliminates a distinguishing feature of how
Meta has managed misinformation on its other apps.
Pai added that posts on Facebook or Instagram rated as false by
fact-checking partners - which include a unit at Reuters - will carry
their labels over if posted on Threads too.
Asked by Reuters to explain why it was taking a different approach to
misinformation on Threads, Meta declined to answer.
In a New York Times podcast on Thursday, Adam Mosseri, the head of
Instagram, acknowledged that Threads was more "supportive of public
discourse" than Meta's other services and therefore more inclined to
draw a news-focused crowd, but said the company aimed to focus on
lighter subjects like sports, music, fashion and design.
Nevertheless, Meta's ability to distance itself from controversy was
challenged immediately.
Within hours of launch, Threads accounts seen by Reuters were posting
about the Illuminati and "billionaire satanists," while other users
compared each other to Nazis and battled over everything from gender
identity to violence in the West Bank.
Conservative personalities, including the son of former U.S. President
Donald Trump, complained of censorship after labels appeared warning
would-be followers that they had posted false information. Another Meta
spokesperson said those labels were an error.
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Meta's Threads app logo is seen in this
illustration taken July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File
Photo
INTO THE FEDIVERSE
Further challenges in moderating content are in store once Meta
links Threads to the so-called fediverse, where users from servers
operated by other non-Meta entities will be able to communicate with
Threads users. Meta's Pai said Instagram's rules would likewise
apply to those users.
"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," she said.
Still, researchers specializing in online media said the devil would
be in the details of how Meta approaches those interactions.
Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and
former head of security at Meta, posted on Threads that the company
would face greater challenges in performing key types of content
moderation enforcement without access to back-end data about users
who post banned content.
"With federation, the metadata that big platforms use to tie
accounts to a single actor or detect abusive behavior at scale
aren't available," said Stamos. "This is going to make stopping
spammers, troll farms, and economically driven abusers much harder."
In his posts, he said he expected Threads to limit the visibility of
fediverse servers with large numbers of abusive accounts and apply
harsher penalties for those posting illegal materials like child
pornography.
Even so, the interactions themselves raise challenges.
"There are some really weird complications that arise once you start
to think about illegal stuff," said Solomon Messing of the Center
for Social Media and Politics at New York University. He cited
examples like child exploitation, nonconsensual sexual imagery and
arms sales.
"If you run into that kind of material while you're indexing content
(from other servers), do you have a responsibility beyond just
blocking it from Threads?"
(Reporting by Katie Paul in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Li and
Matthew Lewis)
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