Meta’s new social platform, Threads, was criticized in its first week of launch for failing to address concerns about hate speech and extremist accounts. Advocates and civil rights groups have expressed disappointment at the lack of accessibility features and community policies outlining how the platform will address these issues.
Civil rights groups warn of hate speech issue in threads
A letter from 24 civil rights, digital justice and pro-democracy organizations — including the nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and GLAAD — criticizes the platform’s parent company for stepping back regarding to create a more secure digital environment for users.
See also: Apple joins threads as new platform now has over 100 million users
Instead of reinforcing your policy, Threads has taken actions that do the opposite, by purposely not extending Instagram’s fact-checking program to the platform and capitulating to bad actors, and by removing a policy to warn users when they trying to track a serial disinformer. With no clear guardrails against future incitement to violence, it’s unclear whether Meta is willing to protect users from high-profile purveyors of election disinformation who violate the platform’s written policies. To date, the platform lacks even the most basic tools for researchers to analyze activity on Threads. Finally, Meta rolled out Threads at the same time you laid off content moderators and community engagement teams, aimed at curbing the spread of disinformation on the platform.
The letter also noted “neo-Nazi rhetoric, electoral lies, denial of COVID and climate change and more toxicity” on the new platform, including accounts that reported “bigorous insults, election denial, COVID-19 conspiracies, targeted harassment and denial of transgender posts. the existence of individuals, misogyny and more.”
Meta flagship Facebook is the most reported platform where hate and harassment occur, according to a July report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In addition, Instagram and Facebook both received an unsatisfactory rating in GLAAD’s 2023 Social Media Safety Index, while Twitter was listed as least safe.
