Social media outlets don't want to piss off Republicans in any way, so they're now specifically targeting Democratic, liberal topics, outlets, and constituencies. First up: Elongated Muskrat is specifically blocking NY Times articles.
X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times.
Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X.
The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets.
“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.
Indeed, article engagement by X posters has dropped by 90% over the last six weeks. Oh, and before we think that Zuckerbot and his Facebook/Threads/Instagram empire are the good guys, well, they're not.
Instagram’s text-based social platform Threads last week rolled out its new search function, a crucial step toward the platform’s expansion and one that would give it more parity with X, formerly known as Twitter.
Not even 24 hours later, the company was embroiled in controversy. When users went to Threads to search for content related to “covid” and “long covid,” they were met with a blank screen that showed no search results and a pop-up linking to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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.
Yes, that's right, Covid is just as bad as porn and gets blocked by Threads in searches. Americans will just have to go to independent social media like TikTok to search for...never mind.
TIKTOK HAS FIXED a mistake that temporarily prevented users from searching for videos related to the Writers Guild of America strike — saying the phrase was accidentally flagged by the app’s filters against QAnon.
News of the block was first reported by Media Matters. When the phrase WGA was put into the search bar, viewers were instead shown a warning that the search “may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines.” The hashtag WGA also did not bring up any videos.
A spokesperson for TikTok told Rolling Stone on Monday that the search term was inadvertently blocked as part of existing protections against QAnon conspiracy theories, which violate community guidelines against disinformation. In 2020, the app banned several large hashtags related to the conspiracy theory and told Rolling Stone in a statement that the company would be developing a way to make QAnon-related content harder to find with TikTok’s search function.
The spokesperson also noted that searching WGA fully written out as Writers Guild strike or “Writers’ Guild of America” would show related videos.
Just a mistake, you see. Until they got caught.
Blockheads, all of them.
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