Will Threads be a better Twitter?
Facebook's parent company Meta launched the Threads news service on Wednesday. With this move Meta is going head-to-head with Twitter, which has been in turmoil since Elon Musk took over and has faced criticism for problematic content and a lack of moderation. Threads is not yet available in the EU due to unresolved privacy issues. Some commentators are euphoric while others are unsparing in their criticism.
Social paradise
Posta journalist Mehmet Coşkundeniz has opened an account and is thrilled:
“So far it's great. It's like the early years of Twitter. There are no troll armies, the lynch mob hasn't yet arrived. No one is saying 'don't write that, delete that'. ... Right now it's like a social paradise. I don't know how long it will stay like this, but we must make the most of it. On Threads you can upload videos up to five minutes long. The character limit is 500 per message. ... I wish it would stay like this forever. ... Go Threads, wipe the arrogance off Musk's face.”
Potential thanks to Musk's failure
Twitter could suffer the same fate as other major internet applications, says La Stampa:
“In the 1990s, when Microsoft introduced Explorer, the decline of Netscape began. A decade later, MySpace was doomed and Facebook entered our lives. And perhaps the end of Twitter began yesterday when Mark Zuckerberg launched Threads. ... That Threads has a chance of succeeding is due in no small part to the fact that Twitter, under Elon Musk's stewardship, has become increasingly offensive and uninteresting. So one could say that the end of Twitter - if it comes - began with Musk's purchase in October 2022.”
Another data octopus
Journalist Alfonso Ussía voices annoyance over the Threads launch in The Objective:
“The guy who has become immensely rich thanks to your data can now sell your information to the highest bidder and continue making money at your expense. ... It turns out that the app's terms of use in the US - Europe is still considering whether to allow him to continue stealing - include location and identification data, phone number and contacts, and all content on the device. ... What I find alarming is that we no longer have time to think, to read, to be bored, to question all the nonsense that is churned out over and over again on social networks, because this is how we get our endorphins from these millionaires who have gotten rich by making idiots of half the world.”
No adults left at Twitter
Threads is just another nail in Twitter's coffin, The New European remarks:
“Twitter has a very real chance of going bankrupt in the next 12 months. ... Musk has done the opposite of everything he promised with the site. Most users will notice that they get more annoyance from bots than they had before, abuse and hate speech is more widespread, and misinformation spreads much more easily without the site's curation team watching for it and tackling it. ... There are major elections in the UK, EU and US next year. There are no adults left at Twitter to safeguard their integrity. Twitter's chaos has consequences - but it's not Elon Musk who'll feel them. It is, alas, all of us.”