Previously: Zuckerberg has a Golden Opportunity to Rebrand His Twitter Clone as “The Free Speech Alternative to Twitter”

There could only be a showdown with Facebook if the US government allowed Europe to have such a showdown. Europe does not have independent policies, all of them are dictated to them by the United States. Obviously, they have stricter speech rules than the US (at least technically), but those rules are all driven by the US desire to shut down speech globally.

Just look at the way the Germans have gone along with supporting Ukraine terrorism against their country, gone along with collapsing their own industrial sector, because the US tells them to do that. It’s ridiculous and humiliating.

However, US organs at the State Department probably do not agree with Donald Trump easing the restrictions on speech rules in America, and they will likely use European bodies to attack those changes.

The Guardian:

Sweeping changes to the policing of Meta’s social media platforms have set the tech company on a collision course with legislators in the UK and the European Union, experts and political figures have said.

Lawmakers in Brussels and London criticised Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to scrap factcheckers in the US for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, with one labelling it “quite frightening”.

The changes to Meta’s global policies on hateful content now include allowing users to call transgender people “it”, with the guidelines stating: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.”

Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP and chair of the science and technology committee for the House of Commons, which is investigating how online disinformation fuelled last summer’s riots, said Zuckerberg’s decision to replace professional factcheckers with users policing the accuracy of posts was “concerning” and “quite frightening”.

“To hear that Meta is removing all its factcheckers [in the US] is concerning … people have a right to be protected from the harmful effects of misinformation,” she said. “The fact that Zuckerberg said he’s following the example of X must raise concerns when we compare how X is a platform for misinformation to a greater extent than Facebook has been.”

Chi Onwurah is frightened.

She’s one of the top British people, you know.

People better take her emotions seriously.

Meta’s move, which Zuckerberg made clear was a response to the incoming Donald Trump presidency, also prompted predictions that a major challenge is coming from the Trump administration against laws such as the Online Safety Act.

The former UK technology minister, Damian Collins, said such a challenge will “most likely be made through trade negotiations where pressure will be brought against the UK to accept American standards for digital regulation”.

…

A Meta whistleblower told the Guardian: “I am extremely concerned about what this means for teenagers.”

Teenagers are useless anyway.

Who cares what happens to them?

Arturo Béjar, a former senior engineer whose responsibilities at Meta included child safety measures, said: “They will be increasingly exposed to all the content categories that they need to be protected against.”

Harmful content, including violent or pornographic material, could reach young users more easily, Bejar said, citing Zuckerberg’s statement that tackling “lower severity” transgressions will now rely on users flagging content before Meta acts on it.

…

Zuckerberg has said his policy of ditching factcheckers applies only in the US for now, but his broadside against Europe has raised concerns that he is planning to roll out the approach in Europe.

It’s very expensive for these companies to do all of this censorship, which I think is why they’re all excited to stop doing it. With Twitter, it was something like 75% of employees at the company were working in the censorship department.

It’s all ridiculous, and hopefully we’re getting to the point where we can ask about personal responsibility, and start asking if it is possible for the government to view people as adults who are capable of making their own decisions.

Obviously, the idea that the government would view its citizens as adults capable of making decisions is far outside of established norms in the current year, with the government having moved to treat everyone like a little baby. Clearly, everyone in the government prefers to have strict policies that allow them to control what people think and do.

Elon is stunting on Zuck, dumping the brand he paid $44 billion for and replacing it with one of the worst letters in the alphabet just to show that no matter how retarded he behaves, he can still beat “Threads.”

Reuters:

Meta Platforms executives are heavily focused on boosting retention on their new Twitter rival Threads, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its buzzy launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday.

Retention of users on the text-based app was better than executives had expected, though it was “not perfect,” said Zuckerberg, speaking at an internal company town hall, the audio of which was heard by Reuters.

“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.

There is no real evidence that many people signed up. Well, there is evidence, but it could have been faked. Obviously, instagram has a lot of users, and there is reason to believe they were manipulated into joining.

The downloads also could have been botted for hype purposes.

The site never really had a chance. Aside from buying WhatsApp and insta, Zuck has failed at everything after his initial product (which was mostly successful because of nepotism).

Elon, meanwhile, has been very successful with very low quality products.

Zuckerberg said he considered the drop-off “normal” and expected retention to grow as the company adds more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality.

Meta is looking at adding more “retention-driving hooks” to entice users to return to the app, like “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads,” said Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

A company spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting.

…

Responding to a question on the proposed “cage match” against Elon Musk, Zuckerberg said he was “not sure if it’s going to come together.”

Zuck actually looks a lot better with his shirt off than I expected.

I’m not sure if this is a new thing. he looks like he might have started training with drugs.

Meta does not look very good with its shirt off, however.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse has lost over $21.3 billion since 2022. pic.twitter.com/c8wtcfxozY

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) July 27, 2023

To be fair, it’s not really fair to talk about a decline from 2022-23 as if it is a vacuum, given that this was the post covid fallout period.

But Meta is definitely doing a lot worse than all of the rest of the big tech companies.

AWS really saved Amazon, and Apple just keeps on sailing for reasons no one can even explain.

Meanwhile, Elon has announced that he will be changing the name of “Tesla” to “R.”

Zuck is a cuck

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2023

Yikes.

Embarrassing.

CNBC:

What comes up must come down — at least in the case of user engagement on Threads, Meta’s new Twitter competitor.

Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days, but according to data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb, the service has seen some dropoff in growth and engagement.

“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC. “In the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.”

That would make sense, given that the hype was in a class by itself.

However, people responding to hype and trying a new app when it first comes out doesn’t say anything about the quality of the app, but only the quality of the hype.

But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” Bartolacci said. “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”

Okay, well.

If you can figure out what that value proposition would be, then Zuck will give you billions of dollars. He can’t figure it out, and not being able to figure it out is costing him billions of dollars.

Elon Musk being the CEO of Twitter does not affect anyone’s user experience. Liberals are very whiny, self-righteous, and entitled, so they will complain that they don’t think someone who they disagree with should be allowed to own something they use. But there is a reality that people need this app for work, and cannot simply be replaced by the same app owned by someone who agrees with the government more simply because people have emotions.

This was always a very stupid idea, and it makes Zuck and his company look pathetic.

When Microsoft tried to compete with Twitch in the streaming space – a space that is not a natural monopoly and wouldn’t ever really be a monopoly in the way Twitter is a natural monopoly – Microsoft spent a bunch of money hiring people like Ninja for exclusive deals.

It didn’t work at all, and Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Zuckerberg didn’t even seem to really be trying. How is he going to launch this app and offer literally nothing other than “Elon Musk isn’t here so there is more censorship”?

The pitch is: “switch your entire internet life over to this app to somehow maybe punish your political enemies in some way.”

It was also widely reported – I guess as a feature? – that Threads would spy on users a lot more than Twitter does.

Related: Zuck to Use Twitter Rip-Off App to Do Even More Invasive Data Collection

DO NOT DELETE THE THREADS APP pic.twitter.com/rfcD9meH7m

— albert (@albert12798) July 8, 2023

Is it even possible for Facebook to do “even more” privacy violations?

Well. Apparently so.

The Guardian:

In just a matter of days, Meta’s new Threads app has reached 100 million users, solidifying the Twitter competitor’s claim to the title of the most rapidly downloaded app ever.

That rapid growth has concerned privacy experts, who warn that few users realize just how much information the app collects. They point out that Meta has put the launch of Threads in the European Union on hold because it’s unclear whether the way the company handles user data and shares it across different platforms, including Threads, will run afoul of impending privacy regulations.

Haha.

It’s not even legal in the EU because it is such a hardcore spy app.

Of course, it’s legal to spy in the US, because we have the First Amendment, which was designed to protect the rights of multinational corporations to invade the private lives of citizens.

“Several of the privacy concerns with Threads tie back to Meta’s history of concerning privacy practices,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), a digital privacy nonprofit. “I haven’t seen any evidence that Meta is being transparent about what it will do with sensitive personal data or is clearly establishing why it is collecting that data other than ‘because we want to’.”

Well, they “want to” so they can see it to private companies and the US government.

It’s very profitable.

The list of past practices that give experts like Schroeder cause for concern is long. In addition to being under a FTC consent decree because of previous improper collection and use of data in the US, Meta has also been fined for collecting sensitive personal data without obtaining the proper consent under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

…

Just like its sister platforms, Instagram and Facebook, Threads can and will collect a great deal of data on its users.

Meta’s apps receive whatever information users enter, said Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez.

That can include sensitive data such as health and fitness information, financial information, location and browsing history, according to the app store entry for Threads.

All of that is categorized and sold.

We’ve been through all of this.

Everyone knows and apparently, no one cares.

The platform provides the company with information on what posts users engage with and whom they are following. That includes “the types of content you view or interact with and how you interact with it”, as well as how long and how often you use Threads, according to the Threads privacy policy. In addition to users’ Threads activity, the company’s privacy policy indicates it also has access to GPS location, cameras, photos, IP information, the type of device being used and device signals including “Bluetooth signals, nearby Wi-Fi access points, beacons and cell towers”.

It’s basically “your entire life.”

But look – you can trust this Zuckerberg guy, and you can trust every corporation and government he sells all this information to.

They are only going to use it for advertisement. And to build models on your behavior so they can do psychological operations against you, like the coronavirus hoax, the BLM hoax, or the Ukraine war hoax.

Combined, this information can paint an extremely detailed and intricate map of people’s lives, particularly when taken together with all of the data Meta already collects through Facebook, Instagram and Meta Pixel.

Meta Pixel, a short piece of code that can be added to websites, tracks and analyzes visitor activity, after which various versions of that data are shared with Meta. For instance, several pharmacies and grocery chains reportedly share sensitive information with Meta and other social platforms through Pixel including whether consumers added Plan B or HIV or pregnancy tests to their carts, according to news website the Markup.

…

“We should absolutely be concerned about the amount of data Meta can hold on individuals,” Schroeder of Epic said. “Not only is this a huge risk for breaches – and Meta has already had and been penalized for several major data breaches in the past – but the data can be used to infer even more information about an individual that they may not voluntarily share.”

These privacy “watchdogs” never do anything.

But it’s not really their fault, maybe.

The issue is that the population doesn’t care.

Mark Zuckerberg says he’s not thinking about monetization of users on his Twitter clone, Threads, but that’s a lie. His business model is selling our data to advertisers. Threads has near zero privacy. It knows our location, “Health & Fitness,” “Financial Info,” “Sensitive Info” pic.twitter.com/BusczYqaIG

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 6, 2023

How to put 666 ‘the number of the beast’ into a logo. pic.twitter.com/ITsUPFK78V

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 7, 2023

THREADS IS RUN BY SATANISTS pic.twitter.com/CGRPQiNvnL

— Spence Rogers (@SpenceRogers) July 7, 2023

I think the growth of Rumble has proved something to Silicon Valley: there is a serious desire for some kind of freedom, where you aren’t being looked over by a nanny.

It looks like, in order to entice people onto the platform, Zuck is going to make his new Twitter clone a bit more free than his other platforms.

As we’ve seen from Zuckerberg, he doesn’t actually even like censorship. That’s been an ongoing thing. He says he’s forced to do it by pressure groups and the intelligence services.

Probably, if he is stealing users from Twitter, those groups are going to be demanding a lot less censorship, at least in the early days of the site, while he is at war with Musk.

Reuters:

Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Meta’s Twitter copycat app, Threads, as a “friendly” refuge for public discourse online, framing it in sharp distinction to the more adversarial Twitter which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk.

“We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place,” Meta CEO Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, shortly after the service’s launch.

Maintaining that idealistic vision for Threads – which attracted more than 70 million users in its first two days – is another story.

To be sure, Meta Platforms is no newbie at managing the rage-baiting, smut-posting internet hordes. The company said it would hold users of the new Threads app to the same rules it maintains on its photo and video sharing social media service, Instagram.

(Which, by the way, has a lot less censorship than Facebook.)

The Facebook and Instagram owner also has been actively embracing an algorithmic approach to serving up content, which gives it greater control over the type of fare that does well as it tries to steer more toward entertainment and away from news.

However, by hooking up Threads with other social media services like Mastodon, and given the appeal of microblogging to news junkies, politicians and other fans of rhetorical combat, Meta is also courting fresh challenges with Threads and seeking to chart a new path through them.

For starters, the company 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.

I’ve got a Pai for Christine, if you catch my drift

Pai added that posts on Facebook or Instagram rated as false by fact-checking partners – which include a unit at Reuters – will carry their labels over if posted on Threads too.

Asked by Reuters to explain why it was taking a different approach to misinformation on Threads, Meta declined to answer.

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 and therefore more inclined to draw a news-focused crowd, but said the company aimed to focus on lighter subjects like sports, music, fashion and design.

Adam Mosseri sure looks JEWISH

Nevertheless, Meta’s ability to distance itself from controversy was challenged immediately.

Within hours of launch, Threads accounts seen by Reuters were posting about the Illuminati and “billionaire satanists,” while other users compared each other to Nazis and battled over everything from gender identity to violence in the West Bank.

Conservative personalities, including the son of former U.S. President Donald Trump, complained of censorship after labels appeared warning would-be followers that they had posted false information. Another Meta spokesperson said those labels were an error.

Further challenges in moderating content are in store once Meta links Threads to the so-called fediverse, where users from servers operated by other non-Meta entities will be able to communicate with Threads users. Meta’s Pai said Instagram’s rules would likewise apply to those users.

“If an account or server, or if we find many accounts from a particular server, is found violating our rules then they would be blocked from accessing Threads, meaning that server’s content would no longer appear on Threads and vice versa,” she said.

Did they use a satanic pedophile symbol for their logo?

I don’t understand Donald Trump Jr.’s attack.

But I support it.

Threads not exactly off to a great start. Hey Instagram, threads is verbal, so the whole skimpy bikini thing is not going to work so well if your influencers can’t actually formulate a sentence… IMHO you may want to rethink cutting off those who can. pic.twitter.com/vBKIOjg8Z8

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 6, 2023

Editor’s Note: I’m banned from Twitter still. I’m thinking of making a Threads account and seeing what happens. If they don’t censor me, I might become a shill and help bring down Twitter. I am very bitter about being banned from Twitter for literally no reason, and then not being able to talk to any real person to hear the explanation for why I was banned. I don’t care if they put a warning that I spread anti-vax disinformation, rape advocacy, and anti-Semitism. Everyone already knows I do that. If Threads were to allow me to stay (I’ll be on best behavior), that would disprove the entire theory being put forward that Twitter is “the free speech alternative.” -AA