Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.
“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”
Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day. “I was excited by search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in covid, I came up with no search results.”
Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick. Hospitalizations jumped nearly 16 percent in the United States last week and have been rising steadily since July, according to CDC data, though they remain less than what they were for the comparable week a year ago. Deaths are less than a quarter of what they were year to year, CDC statistics show.
(OP: Sorry, paywall, can’t find another source yet. Someone got an archive?)
They’ve been clear that they don’t want news, they don’t want social discussion, they don’t want politics; they want pure, unadulterated consumerism and nothing else. It’s probably the purest expression of “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things” that we’ve ever seen in social media.
Man, I’d never read “Stop talking to each other and start buying things” before, that’s a hell of an article.
So they clearly don’t want to be useful for anything other than engagement with influencers. What a shame.
Meanwhile, Mastodon just enabled opt-in full text search so hashtags aren’t the only way to find posts anymore.
Can’t wait for that text search to launch fully in Mastodon. It’s pretty much the only thing missing for me.
the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”
So is meta now taking responsibility for all search results?
Always have been
Being on Mastodon is great because if your server admin did something like this, you could tell them to get fucked and just move to a different server.
I’m surprised people are criticizing this. Facebook was the cause of a lot of deaths the first time around. This seems like an attempt to prevent the spread of misinformation
::taps forehead:: Can’t be spreading misinformation if you don’t allow people to search for any information.
Trump’s solution to rising case counts in 2020: Stop counting. Problem solved. /smh
I’m constantly surprised everyone whiiines and whines about “cancel culture”, but doesn’t bat an eye at literal non-government censorship.
It’s nice to see people actually pay attention for once.
90% of the time I’ve seen someone complain about “cancel culture” they’re not talking about anything government-related.
And about 95% there was never any cancelling occurring. Someone was just upset they violated some rules or a brand didn’t want their image tarnished by a shithead.
True
KELLY RIPA CAME INTO MY HOME
The topic is non-government censoring. I only said non-government because tons of idiots jump to claim corporations aren’t the government when it comes to them censoring people.
If cancel culture isn’t governmental, then it only reinforces my point.
Yeah, I have no love for Meta, but this is a case of damned if you do or damned if you don’t. If they didn’t censor it, how much do you bet there’d be an article posted here that said “Threads allows Covid and vaccine misinformation to spread as cases rise”
This community loses all critical thinking skills as soon as the title mentions Meta or Google lol
Good. Folks trying to get info about serious topics from Threads … shouldn’t. Nor from X, nor Facebook, nor Kbin, nor Mastodon. Or tiktok or any other social media platform.
A medium is as good as the content within. I wouldn’t throw everything out to try and sanitize the internet. Better to show why some data is worse than others, and how to validate that data. Start with not trusting the first thing you find, and dig deeper. That requires some time and effort, unfortunately, but there’s no easy answer to filtering facts and fiction.
It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately it’s been proven not to work. Misinformation spreads way faster than facts.
I have this mindset that in this information era, if something is put in front of you, someone else spent money and effort for that. Most often, that person is benefiting or profiting from it and you’re nothing but a puppet in that war.
Does that mean the news and other media we see are all false? Not really. But it certainly means it makes us worry or pay attention to irrelevant stuff instead of worrying about things that are actually important for us individually.
When you see it from this angle you realize there’s so much more important stuff happening, but news outlets decide to write about some Threads search meddling (which seems nobody uses anyway, but some people apparently feel threatened by it).
Well, in theory social media platforms could be good. The idea is solid - you follow trustworthy people, they post valuable information, you see it.
I think for example journa.host is an interesting experiment in making social media actually valuable - everyone there is a confirmed journalist of some sort.
Of course, it can never be perfect. But it allows for greater variety of content: I often find myself reading just two or three newspapers regularly, and in the end social media posts are useful supplement that gives me stories I might not otherwise see elsewhere. That said, I have a pretty strictly curated Mastodon feed.
The idea is solid in theory, but terrible in practice because people suck - just like communism!
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There’s a lot of dis/misinformation on them, but those sites are also useful tools for organizing around issues and getting the correct information in front of people who otherwise would never see it and unfortunately there aren’t great alternatives available.
Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick.
shouldn’t public health workers prefer that general public uses some real news source instead of morons on fucking social network?
i am not even sure sure what the purpose of the article is. are they complaining about “censorship”, or is the article happy that it prevents spreading of misinformation?
The purpose of the article is reporting on something. It’s just facts, not an opinion piece
When vaccines for COVID rolled out in Ontario, the Conservatives did such a piss poor job of managing the whole thing that basically no one could figure out where to find them or when they were available. Vaccination rates remained some of the lowest in Canada while thousands of vials sat around expiring.
During this epic shit show, the only reliable and useful source of information on where and how you could get vaccinated was a single Twitter account.
(OP: Sorry, paywall, can’t find another source yet. Someone got an archive?)
Quick tip: disabling JavaScript will get you past the paywall. Ublock Origin can disable JavaScript on a temp/permanent bases for specific websites, and I always set news websites to JavaScript off or else they’re a real pain to read.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day.
Julia Doubleday, outreach director at the World Health Network, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the coronavirus, said: “Social media is a lifeline for patients, literally.
Long covid patients have died of organ failure, infections, cardiac events and more, and social media is one place they can share information.
In July, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that Threads is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news,” and that “the goal isn’t to replace Twitter.”
Emily Vraga, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said the decision to block search results for important keywords “does not situate Threads as a replacement for the Twitter that once existed.”
Blocking certain words from search outright is also ultimately ineffective, Farid said, because users will quickly develop euphemisms and turns of phrase to get around them.
The original article contains 894 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
