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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.