ALBAWABA – Meta announced it would hold users of the new Threads app to the same rules enforced on its photo and video sharing social media service, Telegram, Reuters reported Sunday.
Notably, Threads has seen 70 million sign ups in its first two days, news agencies reported.
"We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place," Meta CEO Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, shortly after Threads’ launch.
The new Twitter-like app will serve as a "friendly" refuge for online public discourse, in sharp distinction to the more adversarial blue bird, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
Meta also has been actively embracing an algorithmic approach to serving up content.
Algorithms give the company greater control over the type of content it pushes on the platform, as it tries to steer more toward entertainment and away from news.
Whether or not the same approach, in terms of content, will apply to Threads remains to be seen.
To begin with, Meta will not extend its existing fact-checking program to Threads, spokesperson Christine Pai said in an emailed statement on Thursday.
This eliminates a distinguishing feature of how Meta has managed misinformation on its other apps, according to Reuters.
However, Pai added, posts on Facebook or Instagram that are rated as false by fact-checking partners will carry their false news labels over when posted on Threads.
In a New York Times podcast on Thursday, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, acknowledged that Threads was more "supportive of public discourse" than Meta's other services, as reported by Reuters.
Therefore it is more inclined to draw in news-focused crowds. Yet, the company aimed to focus on lighter subjects like sports, music, fashion and design, he said.
Threads accounts have been reportedly posting about the Illuminati and "billionaire satanists," while other users compared each other to Nazis and fought over everything from gender identity to violence in Palestine’s West Bank.
