The Day Zuck Ruined Threads

“The day….the Music Threads…Died”

Zuck gave us a present this morning.

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do:

  1. Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
  2. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
  3. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
  4. Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
  5. Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
  6. Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.

It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I’m looking forward to this next chapter!

It’s weird that you can almost hear the saliva hit the floor after all these tech icons are through servicing the new Overlords. Money can’t buy you self-respect, folks.

So, another layer of grief. Every “adult” community I’ve ever been a part of is once again gone:

  • Three or Four churches, one of which was the structure of our family social life for 7 years.
  • VWVortex.com, the nitromethane to my car addiction
  • My Autocross friends. It was too painful to participate after I stopped racing.
  • Twitter, which was my refuge from 2007 to Musk’s buyout. Granted this KILLED my blog output, so it was a mixed bag but the shouting into the void was cathartic.
  • Now Threads, in which Meta has gone completely off the deep end.

The loneliness of middle age continues. It’s a dark winter, indeed.

I’m glad this place exists and only I have the password. self.shout_into(void)