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?)
What an insane decision. Deciding you won’t host adult content on your platform is one thing. Saying “well you can’t talk about COVID here” is something else entirely.
Sounds like they worried about misinfo popping up from search rather than, you know, actually moderating their platform.
That is probably exactly what it is. Disappointing regardless.
It’s a problem of scale. Places like Threads and X are too large to do any real moderation as we think of it. Hell, Reddit only barely manages it with unpaid volunteers and that is highly uneven in its results. The sheer volume and speed of posting on those platforms would make it an absolute nightmare to try to do.
This is why people need to be their own moderators.
Block people who say things you don’t want to see. It’s a pretty simple concept, but some children legitimately believe that if they don’t want to see something, then neither should anyone else.