š Welcome to the Internet User Experience (IUX), a newsletter on all things Internet culture and technology. Here, I discuss an in-depth issue or trend in social media, with my eye on how it impacts users. Free subscribers can expect posts every Monday, with paid subscribers getting an additional post on Wednesdays and unlimited access to archived posts.
ā° TL:DR
Metaās Threads is here, and is largely being celebrated as an overwhelmingly positive alternative to Twitter.
However, like other Meta-owned apps, Threads collects an obscene amount of personal and sensitive data from users.
The culture of Threads is currently a mix of toxic positivity, and users realizing they donāt want to post Twitter-like thoughts to an Instagram-like audience.
š§µ Is Threads Hanging by a Thread?
Last week, and a day early, Meta launched its Twitter competitor, Threads. The text-first app allows users to post in up to 500 characters and include links, photos, and videos up to five minutes in length. Initial reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, with many pundits quickly praising the app as the Twitter replacement. To be sure, some celebration is necessary. Less than a week after launch, Threads has registered over 100 million users, and as Iāve written about before, public opinion matters a great deal when it comes to how social media platforms are understood, (un)regulated, adopted, or rejected. And public opinion around Threads is presently outstanding.
So like the wet blanket of academia that I am, let me point out the immediate problems that I see, as well as what may be Threadsā demise in the future.
šPrivacy and Data Security
While everyone is praising Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for such a lovely app, letās remember that this is the same Mark Zuckerberg that allowed user data to be stolen and manipulated in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This is the same Mark Zuckerberg that pioneered a āDeepFaceā facial recognition technology that ultimately was shut down on the heels of a settled lawsuit. This is the same Mark Zuckerberg that decided not to notify users when the personal information of 533 million Facebook users was compromised and posted to a hacking forum. This is the same Mark Zuckerberg that let Facebook and Instagram store user passwords in plain text, rather than in encrypted formats.
The European Union knows this, and thatās why Threads is currently unavailable in all EU countries. One of the things individuals praised about Threads was its ease of signup, which quickly synced to the userās existing Instagram account and allowed them to follow/follow back all Instagram connections. Admittedly even I praised this in my first few minutes on the app. But this is the type of move that has European Union data regulators raising an eyebrow, particularly related to platforms abusing their market power for decreased competition. Furthermore, you canāt delete your Threads account without also deleting your Instagram account. If user pushback on this increases or the EU sets a hard line on this for the app to be in Europe, I think this feature could go away. But right now, if youāve signed up for Threads, even on a whim to see what all the fuss is about, you canāt get rid of it without also getting rid of the potentially substantial audience youāve built on Instagram.
While all platforms collect an obscene amount of data on us, and we have little-to-no control over what happens with that data, what Threads collects on its users is emblematic of Metaās data grabbing. The app collects highly sensitive information about its users, including health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, and search history on and off the app, among others. Given that the core of Metaās business model is selling this information for behavioral advertising microtargeting, thereās no question about what is going to happen with this data.
šÆ Context Collapse (or, you didnāt want your boss to see THAT)
One of the most significant challenges users face with social media is that these platforms collapse audiences. In other words, groups of people we may try to keep separate in our offline lives (family, friends, coworkers, etc.), can become enmeshed together as on giant audience online. If you accept the friend or follower request and donāt engage with privacy features (if you even can), that means your boss can see your Facebook status thatās maybe meant for family, your mom can see your Instagram story that was meant for your friends, and so on. This has led to an immense body of social media research trying to figure out how users navigate collapsed audience contexts online.
Threads is the epitome of context collapse, and watching users figure this out in real time has been fascinating to me as a social media scholar. Context collapse might not immediately seem apparent, as well, if Threads syncs all your Instagram contacts to the app, that should be fine since you already follow all those people anyway. Right?
Wrong. The problem isnāt audiences, itās how people use and understand platforms. Threads is being billed as a Twitter alternative, not an Instagram addition. This distinction matters. How people use Twitter (or any of the other microblogging platforms that have gained popularity over the last few months) may be completely different than how they use Instagram. Instagram is a place for aesthetic photos, of showing off trips and meals and fun experiences. Twitter is for breaking news, hot takes, and debates (for better or worse) about a range of topics. Trying to merge these two formats will inevitably invite growing pains, and users who have engaged with text-based microblogging may not want to perform the same way for their Instagram followers.
Platforms are not interchangeable. Meta touts Facebook and Instagram as being all about building community, but Twitter, in its own words, has never been about that - itās about information dissemination. I wrote about this back in 2020, when I analyzed all of the community standards documents for major U.S. social media platforms. Of course, users can and do make platform experiences their own, but if Threads is meant to be a Twitter competitor, the mission is at odds with Instagramās written purpose.
ā ļø Toxic Positivity
Shoutout to my colleague Ludmila Lupinacci at the University of Sussex for pointing this out and getting my wheels turning. Check out her work here.
One of the main things currently being celebrated on Threads is how nice it is. Not the infrastructure, but the people and the posts. And you know, thatās great. We love niceness. We love kindness. But not at the expense of nuance, or when it does harm. Threads is heading in that direction.
While users were celebrating how nice Threads seemed to be, and how the crankiness, bad faith, and critique that are ubiquitous on Twitter seemed absent on the new app, a concerning trend emerged: Policing anything users deemed as too ānegativeā for Threads (Iām kicking myself for not screenshotting an example of this when I had the chance; Threads doesnāt let you search the content of posts, so itās lost to time). This has been compounded by posts begging audiences to keep Threads kind and positive. This amount to a form of toxic positivity, in which individuals are pressured to display positive emotions. The problem with toxic positivity is it invalidates large swaths of the human experience and promotes unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Some people may drag me for this, but keeping Threads positive is impossible. The problems we face on social media - hate, harassment, trolling, partisanship, polarization, etc. - arenāt endemic to social media. They are endemic to people, and social media merely exacerbate these tendencies and allow for new ways to express them.
This toxic positivity was espoused by Adam Mosseri, Instagramās CEO, in Threads posts over the weekend. See below.
Mosseriās words are incredibly concerning for so many reasons. First, and I wonāt even dive into this here because I could do a whole post about social media and the inaccurate use of the public square metaphor, he misunderstands how people use microblogging sites to communicate. Second, itās almost laughable he says Instagram (owned by Metaās) business model does not substantially profit off of, or support, promoting extremist content for increased engagement. Thatās all Facebook does.
Third, his claim politics and hard news donāt show up regularly on Instagram is a shocking statement given how frequently they actually do. There are numerous extremist accounts popular on Instagram that actively espouse hate, harassment, and disinformation. Furthermore, Instagram aesthetics on things like natural health and eating, trad wives, and more have been a pipeline into extremist ideologies such as anti-vaccinations, QAnon, and other conspiracy theories.
Finally, Mosseri doesnāt seem to understand that not engaging with politics and news is a privilege. Users seeking to keep this content off Threads also donāt understand that. For many marginalized groups, keeping up with politics and news is essential, given the direct implications these issues and decisions have on their lives. Sharing this information can be lifesaving. The personal is political, and b saying politics and hard news arenāt really welcome on Threads, Mosseri and users are basically saying, āActivists and marginalized groups need not apply.ā
Meanwhile, right-wing figures Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes have both joined Threads.
š Wrapping Up
A key piece of information about Threads that may be getting lost in the shuffle - the app is also Metaās foray into Web 3.0. The press release states, āWeāre working to soon make Threads compatible with the open, interoperable social networks that we believe can shape the future of the internet.ā I wrote about the challenges of open and interoperable Web 3.0 in last weekās free post, noting how āopenā and āinteroperableā for the tech industry can mean confusing and more likely to erect walls for audiences.
Remember, Mark Zuckerberg is not your social media savior. Donāt let Meta lead you to believe Threads is the social media solution to problems of hate, polarization, disinformation, and data security that were long amplified by Facebook and Instagram.
We donāt need to play the game of which billionaire app is better. When we do, we all lose.
šAcademic Readings to Learn More:
Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2010), āI tweet honestly, I tweet passionatelyā: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience.
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield, and Crystal Abidin: Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (Polity, 2020)
AndrĆ© Brock (2012), āFrom the blackhand side: Twitter as cultural conversation.ā
š Things Iām Keeping My Eye on This Week:
Clemson University is set to ban TikTok on all networks this Fall.
Twitch.tv announced several changes at TwitchCon that have users excited.
Major film studios are beginning to pay influencers to promote upcoming movies.