- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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?)
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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?
