In part as a consequence of the Israel-Hamas war, more journalists are posting news and analysis on Meta’s Threads platform. From QZ’s Ananya Bhattacharya:
Since its inception, Threads has decided to steer clear of handling hard news—and the Israel-Hamas war hasn’t altered its stance. Yet the platform is quickly becoming a home for reporting on the conflict.
When Meta launched its Twitter-killer app in July, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said the Threads app is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news.” He clarified that the platform won’t “discourage or down-rank” such posts but that the company won’t “court” them either. …
In a blog post today (Oct. 13), Meta said it set up a “special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation in real time.”
In the three days following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Meta removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of regional-language content. On Instagram, a number of hashtags have been restricted, and the use of live-streaming is restricted for people who have previously violated certain policies. The company also is labeling messages forwarded by people who were not the original sender, so that recipients can tell the information came from a third party.
Given the density and frequency of Hamas-related content, Meta is currently taking down content “without strikes, meaning these content removals won’t cause accounts to be disabled.” It’s also sharing tools to let third-party fact checkers more easily find and flag content, and to let users filter out offensive messages and appeal erroneous content decisions.
The whole piece is very good.
—
I have replaced Twitter with Threads on my iPhone, though I have not started posting there in earnest yet. I will soon. It’s a better platform at this point in terms of tone, and there are far, far fewer trolls around.
