Threads, a platform that has focused on avoiding hard news since its inception, is now becoming a hub for reporting on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Despite Meta’s (formerly Facebook) intention to not promote politics and hard news with its Threads app, journalists have taken to the platform to provide reliable information about the conflict. This comes as disinformation about the conflict spreads on other social media platforms.
While Meta has been urged by the EU government to address and remove Hamas-related disinformation from its platforms, Meta has set up a special operations center to monitor and respond to the situation in real time. In the three days following Hamas’ attack on Israel, Meta has removed or marked as disturbing over 795,000 pieces of content in regional languages. The company is also taking measures to label forwarded messages and provide tools for fact-checkers and users to identify and flag offensive or erroneous content.
Threads is also receiving updates to enhance the platform. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, recently announced the addition of features such as an edit button, voice threads, and a trending topics page. These updates aim to improve the user experience on Threads.
This shift away from news-related content is not new for Meta. They have made changes over the years to minimize political content on their platforms, including dropping “News” from the News Feed, reducing the emphasis on political shares and comments, and removing news content in response to legislation in Canada. Furthermore, Israeli and Jewish schools are calling on parents to remove Instagram and TikTok from their children’s devices to prevent exposure to violent images and videos related to the ongoing war.
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