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?)
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.
90% of the time I’ve seen someone complain about “cancel culture” they’re not talking about anything government-related.
And about 95% there was never any cancelling occurring. Someone was just upset they violated some rules or a brand didn’t want their image tarnished by a shithead.
True
The topic is non-government censoring. I only said non-government because tons of idiots jump to claim corporations aren’t the government when it comes to them censoring people.
If cancel culture isn’t governmental, then it only reinforces my point.
KELLY RIPA CAME INTO MY HOME
Yeah, I have no love for Meta, but this is a case of damned if you do or damned if you don’t. If they didn’t censor it, how much do you bet there’d be an article posted here that said “Threads allows Covid and vaccine misinformation to spread as cases rise”
deleted by creator