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?)

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    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.

    Julia Doubleday, outreach director at the World Health Network, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the coronavirus, said: “Social media is a lifeline for patients, literally.

    Long covid patients have died of organ failure, infections, cardiac events and more, and social media is one place they can share information.

    In July, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that Threads is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news,” and that “the goal isn’t to replace Twitter.”

    Emily Vraga, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said the decision to block search results for important keywords “does not situate Threads as a replacement for the Twitter that once existed.”

    Blocking certain words from search outright is also ultimately ineffective, Farid said, because users will quickly develop euphemisms and turns of phrase to get around them.

    The original article contains 894 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!