I signed up for Threads the other day, somewhat against my better judgment. After all, Threads doesn’t have the best blood lines; nothing in its lineage suggests that it will be the secretariat of social media good behavior or ethics.
It is the spawn of Meta, which we still might know as Facebook if Mark Zuckerberg and his brain trust hadn’t decided to rename their behemoth after its many reputation-damaging misdeeds. Those include allowing users’ data to leak out, as well as distributing untold amounts of hate and lies and ultimately, giving Donald Trump an invaluable helping hand in his disastrous 2016 election by spreading Russian disinformation. (Recall, too, the scandal surrounding Facebook’s relationship with the political data firm Cambridge Analytica.)
But it’s all relative, it seems, and people apparently have tweet-sized memories.
These days, the bigger villain is Elon Musk who, since he bought Twitter last year, has been systematically making a not-great place into a much worse place. He has elevated the haters, fired staff who were trying to control the worst content and alienated the very users who made Twitter worthwhile.
Quite the clown show, and a crushing one for those who depend on Twitter for news and to hear voices that are much more diverse than those in mainstream media. For all its faults, Twitter has been democratizing in that way, at least.
But it gets worse by the day and Musk is more than cavalier. He’s disrespectfully ugly. (When news organizations reach out to Twitter these days to get comment for their stories about what’s happening on the platform, they receive a poop emoji in response; and after tweeting “Zuck is a cuck,” Musk suggested Sunday that he and Zuckerberg should compete in “a literal dick measuring contest”.)
“It’s an indication of Elon Musk’s unpopularity that people are so keen to embrace a platform created by Mark Zuckerberg,” the New York Times star reporter Katherine Rosman wrote last week; suitably enough, she did so on Threads.
Embrace it, they certainly have. Immediately after the launch last week, 30 million people signed up. It kept growing explosively over the weekend and was due Monday to hit 100 million users worldwide. (For comparison, the population of the United States is 332 million; you do the math.) A well circulated graphic showing a sharp drop in Twitter’s usage drew cheers from those who had decamped or were planning to.
As I clicked through the steps to become a willing part of this potential mess, one screen’s worth of information stopped me cold – but, in what may be a self-indictment, only for a moment.
“Powered by Instagram,” it began. “Threads is part of the Instagram platform. We will use your Threads and Instagram information to personalize ads and other experiences across Threads and Instagram.” Later, there was a section entitled “Your data,” which might as well have read “You’re doomed.”
So why did I do it?
In short, because it’s a professional necessity – as someone who frequently writes about media – to be where the action is. And because I’m congenitally curious. And because I’m disgusted by Musk and how he’s damaged Twitter; on balance, the platform has been of significant benefit to me as a place to develop sources, get ideas, share my own work and communicate directly with a wide variety of smart people. (I remain on Twitter, as well as on BlueSky, a promising new platform that is still in beta, so for now it is by invitation only.)
What’s more, I realize, as someone who’s already on Facebook and Instagram, that the chimeric horse called Privacy fled the barn a long time ago. Why should I bother with a padlock now?
Still, I worry. I’m well aware that Threads is not yet available in the European Union for the very reasons that ought to concern Americans and others: the app does not comply with EU law, which has stricter provisions on data privacy.
And Zuckerberg’s promises about making Threads less toxic than Twitter – “friendly”, to use his term – are questionable, as a Guardian report by Josh Taylor and Josh Nichols made clear Monday. His words already are belied by the influx of infamous rightwing and white nationalist figures including Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes.
So I’m not especially hopeful about Threads. But for better or worse, I’m there for whatever happens.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
