Zuckerberg's Threads app censors people questioning gender ideology
Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads app is ALREADY being accused of censoring people who question gender ideology – and claims its ‘false information’ warning about Donald Trump Jr. was an error
- Within a week of launching Meta’s Threads has been criticized for censorship
- The platform took down a ‘thread’ questioning non-binary gender identity
- It also discouraged users from following Trump Jr. but said it was an accident
Mark Zuckerberg’s new Threads app has being accused of censoring people who question gender ideology and claimed a ‘false information’ notice that triggered when users tried to follow Donald Trump Jr. was a glitch.
Outrage has spread on rival platform Twitter since the app’s inception earlier this week after claims were made that content questioning gender ideologies was being deleted and users were being actively discouraged from following Donald Trump Jr.
Threads was built by Meta – parent to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – to serve as a competitor to Twitter and has near identical functionality as a text-based social media platform.
Threads was labeled by Meta ‘an Instagram app’ and leverages the picture-focused social media platform’s userbase. It was released in a surprise announcement on Wednesday and within a day it had become the fastest downloaded app of all time.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads app has already taken measures to censor its users by creating hurdles to follow certain people and outright deleting some ‘threads’
A screenshot shared by the popular conservative Twitter profile Libs of TikTok indicated that one of its threads dismissing non-binary gender identity had been taken down by Meta
A screenshot shared by the popular conservative Twitter profile Libs of TikTok indicated that one of its threads dismissing non-binary gender identity had been taken down by Meta on the grounds it went ‘against our guidelines on hate speech’.
Libs of TikTok – which gained traction by mockingly sharing liberal material from TikTok on Twitter – was founded and is run by Chaya Raichik.
According to a notice shared by Raichik, the original thread read: ‘Non-binary isn’t real’ and was posted at around 3am on July 7.
By 11am that thread had been removed and a notice indicated: ‘Your post on Threads goes against our Community Guidelines on hate speech or symbols.
It was posted alongside a number of other messages, including ‘Men can’t breastfeed’ and ‘Men can’t get pregnant’.
Raichik did not say whether those posts were deleted, or whether those posts were made with the intention of testing Threads’ censorship limits.
She complained that Threads had taken action against her over her post, but had not addressed death threats against her.
‘Within hours of joining I got death threats, had people sharing my address, and was told to kill myself,’ Raichik told the Daily Caller.
‘None of those posts were removed despite me reporting them. Only my post stating a fact was removed.’
She told the outlet that failing to do so indicated double standards and went against Zuckerberg’s initial commitment to making Threads a ‘friendly place’.
‘It’s clear that the biased censorship from big tech is still thriving everywhere except Elon’s Twitter,’ she told the Caller. ‘I think I’ll stick with Twitter.’
Users were asked if the definitely wanted to follow Donald Trump Jr. after clicking the follow button. Meta has claimed it was a mistake but not provided any further clarification
After screenshots of the notice went viral, Trump Jr. addressed it himself on Twitter
In a separate controversy a few days earlier Threads included a notice asking users if they definitely wanted to follow Donald Trump Jr. after they pressed the follow button.
‘Are you sure you want to follow donaldtrumpjr?’ read the warning. ‘This account has repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against our Community Guidelines.’
Trump Jr. was not the only person to have been targeted by the warning, which Meta has since claimed was an accident, but provided no further explanation.
After screenshots of the notice went viral, Trump Jr. addressed it himself on Twitter.
‘Threads not exactly off to a great start. Hey Instagram, threads is verbal, so the whole skimpy bikini thing is not going to work so well if your influencers can’t actually formulate a sentence,’ he wrote. ‘You may want to rethink cutting off those who can.’
A spokesperson for Meta, Andy Stone, then replied: ‘This was an error and shouldn’t have happened. It’s been fixed.’
It did not respond to an enquiry from DailyMail.com as to the legitimacy of the notices that certain threads had been deleted.
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