Threads Ban on Search Terms Related to COVID-19 Is ‘Temporary’: Instagram Chief
Social media platform Threads’s ban on search terms related to COVID-19 is only temporary, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has revealed.
In an Oct. 17 post on Threads, Mr. Mosseri said he didn’t have a firm date on when the ban would be lifted, but he didn’t think it would be a permanent situation.
“I don’t have an ETA to give you, unfortunately, but it is temporary, and we are working on it. We’re just getting pulled in a lot of directions at once right now,” Mr. Mosseri said. “The broader team is working on deeper integrations into Instagram and Facebook, graph building, EU compliance, Fediverse support, trending, and generally making sure Threads continues to grow,” he added.
Following Threads’s July release, parent company Meta rolled out several updates, including a new search function similar to that on X, formerly known as Twitter.
However, users soon discovered the new search function blocked access to certain posts related to COVID-19, such as those concerning vaccines and long COVID.
Users searching for some COVID-related terms were reportedly met with a blank screen and redirected to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Censorship doesn’t work. Misinfo still gets circulated by code names & other platforms, tech companies should invest in real solutions like moderation/education,” Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, said at the time in an X post.
Another Tech CEO, Michael Robertson, was far more scathing, saying in an X post that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “treats users like children.” He called for a boycott of Threads and for people to “embrace” rival platform X.
According to a later post by Ms. Tran, words such as sex, nude, gore, porn, coronavirus, vaccines, and vaccination are among other blocked words.
Meta confirmed in a previous statement to The Epoch Times that Threads is blocking users from searching for words that could bring up “sensitive” posts for now, but people would be able to search for keywords such as “COVID” in the future once the company is “confident in the quality of the results.”
In a follow-up post, Mr. Mosseri promised to look into the timeline for unblocking the banned COVID-19 terms on Threads. “Weeks or months, let me look into it and circle back. The reality is that we have lots of important work to do,” he said. “The team is moving fast, but we’re not yet where we want to be,” Mr. Mosseri added.
According to Mr. Mosseri, the primary concern for his team is managing content centred around the Israel–Hamas War.
