The (not so) Great Twitter Exodus
I’ve been sitting on this article since shortly after the launch of Meta’s Threads nearly two months ago. There’s been a few developments since this writing, one of which being Twitter’s rebranding to ‘X’. Despite people’s outrage, the world did not end. Also, Threads usage has died a death. Whatever.
Threads (1984)
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)/Nine Network Australia/Western-World Television Inc.
Threads is a 1984 British-Australian apocalyptic war television film that continues to scar, horrify, and warn generations of the dangers of nuclear warfare via one of the most devastatingly disturbing movies ever created. It’s also one of my all-time favourite films and—
Wait… Scratch that.
Threads is a ‘text-based social app’ with strict character limits.
Sound familiar? It should.
Facebook’s Meta released Threads on July 5th, clearly pitching it as a rival to the platform formerly known as Twitter. It quickly hit 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing app in history. Apparently, within the first 24 hours of launch, 30 million users signed up. Instagram users merely hit some button or other and hey presto, they’re thrown (with all their IG followers) straight into a squeaky clean world of fluffy bunnies and happy chitter-chatter.
At least that’s Zuck’s vision.
“We are definitely focussing on kindness and making this a friendly space.”
–Mark Zuckerberg on the objective of Threads
Someone was paid to come up with this logo. Think about that for a second.
But the sparkly friendliness Zuck so badly wants throughout Threadsland can only be enforced – yes, enforced – through the suppression of opinions, ideas, and thought.
Civilians in Soviet Russia were likely very friendly to each other when passing on the street, but that was because of the constant threat of reprisal and punishment looming over them, not least instigated from their fellow civilians. No, Threads ain’t going the dystopia route, but the maintaining of this ‘friendliness’ the billionaire so desires will ultimately amount to the throttling and/or removal of predictably selected posts (something already reported en masse with troubling patterns), black- or grey-listing accounts (again, reported), and the displaying of warnings on-screen when you attempt to follow certain accounts that Meta’s definitely-not-biased fact checkers deem NAUGHTY.
It’s any platform’s legal right to censor users, but provable, logical, impartial justification is required, something that historically platforms have failed to deliver.
This is, of course, nothing new. Take RocaNews, the fantastic, recently founded news organisation that primarily runs on Meta’s Instagram (but now has an awesome app that you should absolutely check out now). This is what they had to say about their discovering of Meta’s algorithmic suppression:
“We’ve learned that anything having to do with censorship, drugs, sex, and the pandemic is at risk of suppression. One post about the CIA’s proven mind-control experiment was taken down altogether. So was another about ISIS, one about Viagra, and another about MDMA for PTSD treatment. For months in 2022 RocaNews didn’t appear in IG search results. That terrified us and other accounts whose livelihoods depend on getting their content out. It bred fear: Say the right thing or suffer.”
–RocaNews
It’s early days for Threads, but I’m beginning to suspect that its drive for that hallowed FRIENDLINESS is a Trojan horse for censorship. That’s certainly well-trodden ground not only for Meta, but also for pre-Musk Twitter. I’ve quite enjoyed reading people’s opinions of the Musk takeover, both the opinions for and against. There are arguments on either side, although the hysteria with which many of these proclamations are bellowed into the ether casts an unreliable shade on some.
There’s something else that casts unreliability on any of the many angry and vitriolic criticisms against Musk’s Twitter: a failure to acknowledge the old Twitter’s hellscape-like, censorious bias. The evidence for this goes beyond the scope of this article, but things were far from rosy. Of all the diva-like announcements from both celebrities and non-celebrities regarding their dramatic departures from the new Musk Twitter (many of these departures having not, in the end, stuck) few have taken the time to square the new problems with the old. If you’re in such a hurry to leave under Musk’s ruling, why were you happy to hang around before? This is where we get into operating-from-different-facts waters: I believe pre-Musk Twitter was a travesty of suppression and censorship; you may not. We both draw our opinions from different facts. That’s fine, but my position is that the furious rhetoric levelled against Musk-Twitter stands on somewhat shaky ground when you won’t acknowledge the situation before he took the reins.
Three words: the Twitter Files.
Anyway, onto Threads itself.
Disclaimer: I’ve not registered. I find social media exhausting, and adding another to my responsibilities isn’t very high on my to-do list. That doesn’t mean I won’t ever hop on over, but I’m in no rush. I’ll leave the oh-so-holy ZUCK FRIENDLINESS to you lot for now, thanks.
I’m told there’s no search bar, no hashtags, no chronological ordering of your timeline. That’s fine. Sounds a bit crap, I suppose.
I’m also told it’s essentially a clone of Twitter. (Zuck’s good at that. Remember Snapchat…sorry, I mean ‘Instagram Stories’? Or how about TikTok…sorry, ‘Instagram Reels’?) The retweet functionality in Threads is relabelled ‘repost’ (ironically exactly what Musk Twitter has renamed the retweet since his platform’s rebrand to ‘X’) and quote tweets are now ‘quote threads’. The similarities between the two apps – and there are apparently many more – are so blatant that legal action on Musk’s part is now impending.
Zuck’s mission to make everyone be ‘nice’ to each other isn’t going to be achieved so easily. The pissed off and polarised state of current discourse goes beyond a single app. If people of all demographics and opinions amass online, that crappy mode of discourse seems to follow swiftly and naturally. If Threads appears happy and fluffy and ‘safe’ at the moment, that’s either because primarily one side of the political aisle are flocking there, or because another side is being censored. Upon early investigation, it seems both may currently be the case.
Image from TrustedReviews.com (CC).
Since Musk’s controversial takeover, plenty of apps besides Threads have emerged to answer the calls of those unhappy with NewTwitter, but do any of them find better solutions to today’s unhinged discourse? Mastodon offers specialised servers for specific interests or demographics. Y’know, hobbies, nationalities, freemasons, and those with the ‘furry’ fetish. Then there’s Spill, the brainchild of ex-Twitter employees, which is invite-only and positioned as a safe space for marginalised groups. Black? Go here. Gay? Go there. It seems segmentation is the best solution these other apps can come up with to counter the raging nature of this era’s discourse.
So are these our only options for a sanely functioning social media platform? Allow everyone to mingle together so they can poison the cultural conversation with vitriol and vindictiveness, cancelling, doxing, and publicly humiliating at every opportunity? OR: compartmentalise everyone into neat little boxes where they can swim around like fish in a tank with only those of the same arbitrary physical and psychological attributes as themselves? Really? That’s the options?
It was immediately obvious that something like Threads would emerge in the months following Musk’s Twitter takeover, as were the influx of alternatives that have appeared. He’s been accused of fascism, of causing literal violence by restoring formerly banned accounts, and of promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation. I routinely see Twitter users announcing their flat-out blocking of any user with a blue tick (the mark of a Twitter Blue paid subscriber) as if it’s the moral equivalent of a swastika. It was only a matter of time before the desires of these Musk-loathers would be met.
Of course it was going to be Zuck, and he’s given the people what they want, while those happy with Musk’s rule are enjoying Twitter like never before. They see the playing field of conversation and expression as levelled, with the Community Notes feature now democratically flagging misinformation via users, not disconnected fact checkers and biased big tech arbiters.
But if this is the direction we’re really going – splitting people up between social media echo chambers based on their political and cultural persuasions, as opposed to figuring out how to have respectful conversations again, are we really headed for such a great place? Raising walls instead of finding common ground seems a sad solution to the degeneration of discourse we’ve seen in recent years. Surely there must be an option besides combat or compartmentalisation, disdain or dissolution, hostility or demarcation, spite or schism.
We could, y’know, grow the fuck up and learn to talk to each other again.
There’s always that.
–GG
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