Meta Platforms is not showing search results for what it deems “potentially sensitive” topics in its recently launched Twitter (now “X”) rival Threads.<\/p>\n
The Washington Post<\/strong><\/a> was the first to discover that that app is blocking searches of terms related to the Covid-19 pandemic “covid”, “covid-19”, “coronavirus”,” vaccines”, and “covid vaccines”.<\/p>\n It also prevents users from searching for “gore”, “nude”, and “sex”.<\/p>\n Meta first added search functionality for Threads posts<\/strong><\/a> last week, roughly two months after launch. It initially only offered the ability to search for Threads users.<\/p>\n A meta spokesperson told The Washington Post that blocking certain terms in search was a temporary measure.<\/p>\n “The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” they said.<\/p>\n Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who is also responsible for Threads, tweeted<\/a><\/strong> that the company was aiming to learn from its past mistakes and believed it was better to bias towards being careful in the search rollout.<\/p>\n Meta’s other social media platforms \u2014 Facebook and Instagram \u2014 often have their hands full in dealing with a flood of fake news and misinformation.<\/p>\n While Twitter has a team that reviews whether content infringes its policies, it also relies on community-driven fact-checking to annotate potentially misleading posts with context and links to reputable sources.<\/p>\n Although many have criticised Twitter’s approach as being too relaxed, some analysts believe<\/a><\/strong> that the platform allowing certain controversial content is what makes it attractive to many users.<\/p>\n Among the\u00a0blocked search terms are “covid”, “coronavirus”, “vaccines”, and “gore”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":499255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[69787,42468,73842,47332,53641,60669,405,81769],"class_list":["post-507622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-disinformation","tag-fact-check","tag-meta-platforms","tag-misinformation","tag-moderation","tag-threads","tag-twitter","tag-x-app"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507622"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507622"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507688,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507622\/revisions\/507688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNow read: Twitter expands crowd-sourced fact-checking to videos<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"