Get Ready For More Puppies and Bunnies
Meta's announcement that it wants Threads to avoid politics and news may signal a larger desire on the part of Big Social Media to push politics off their platforms
Longtime readers may have noticed that my posting has become unpredictable this summer: blame the lack of urgency that retirement brings! Blame summer! Blame the book I am writing! Blame flooding in Western Massachusetts! (Ok, that’s not true.)
In any case, loyal readers and listeners, thank you for jumping in every time a post goes up or a podcast drops. Things should become more predictable in the next few weeks. And if you know someone who is struggling with the current social media landscape, please:
A week ago, I learned from a New York Times push notification that Mark Zuckerberg had just launched Threads. This new Twitter-like microblogging app has established itself as an alternative to—what? An increasingly broken and chaotic Twitter where Elon drama has displaced nearly all other news? The plethora of new apps that no one can get much traction on?
Yes, I remain a Meta customer. I maintain a Facebook and an Instagram account, neither of which I use very much, but as it so happens, Threads is a derivative of Instagram. So, yay. Curious about this New Shiny Thing, I downloaded the app. It led me through fewer than half a dozen steps, and within ten minutes, I was ready to go with a profile picture, a banner, and a bio that I copied and pasted from Instagram. There was another exciting step: you could transfer all your Instagram followers to Threads, which meant literally transplanting one social network to another. By the next morning, I had twice as many followers as I had accumulated on all of the other faux Twitters combined.
Like other services that have popped up to capture millions of disaffected Twitterati, Threads has tried to be as Twitter-like as possible. This is why Elon has threatened to sue Mark Zuckerberg, although earlier Musk challenged Zuck to a mixed martial arts cage match in Las Vegas, so this may not be serious either.
Threads has a user-friendly, clean interface, allows you to upload photos, quote other posts, and…. that’s about it so far. Unlike Twitter, what works, works, but it is still a little uncooked. There is no .gif widget yet, and one might suspect that Meta’s forced sale of Giphy last fall has delayed this feature. You can’t automatically post a story from your device (as we will see below, there may be a reason for this otherwise shitty and annoying non-feature), and the feed is not chronological.
Threads also offers limited ability to curate one’s own feed. Many people I know hate this because they want greater access to their own follows and followers. Perversely, I like it because I have found myself in real-time exchanges with journalists I know of but do not know. Threads has an intimacy and authenticity that was characteristic of early Twitter. I recently ran into a thread where former California Governor, Terminator, and award-winning bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has a fitness email) was in dialogue with followers reporting the “wins” from their weekly health and wellness regimens.
What’s not like early Twitter is that I cannot link to the Schwarzenegger thread because Threads, like the first incarnation of Instagram, isn’t a web-based platform (yet.) And what’s also not like Twitter is that there is no rolling news feed that allows you to follow breaking stories, however imperfectly, in real-time. On the other hand, Twitter isn’t like that either anymore. This week, as western Massachusetts was flooding, I tried to follow developments on the Bird app, and it simply wasn’t possible.
But the lack of a news feed may be deliberate and a way of saying: “Please do not follow the news on Threads.” Because the other thing that is not like Twitter is that, while you can post about politics and news if you like, few people will see or engage your words because Threads won’t promote those posts. This policy—that Facebook adopted in 2021—made that platform useless to anyone (like me) who was an independent writer, and it now seems to have become Meta-wide.
As I said above, the genealogy of Threads goes through Instagram, whose content is largely puppies, bunnies, food pics, and vacation selfies. “Instagram lead Adam Mosseri said in two Threads posts Friday that the new app would not encourage `politics and hard news’ on its platform,” wrote Antonio Pequeño IV at Forbes, “a far cry from the promoted political content found on itsfundraisingorm Twitter.”
Why? Because, as Pequeño surmised, Facebook’s reputation on the left for spreading disinformation and on the right for stopping the spread of disinformation censoring conservatives means that politics and news are bad for Meta’s brand. Period. And they need to go. Who needs to go to Congress twice a year to be abused by a bunch of Senators whose campaigns you have liberally contributed to, particularly when you have no intention of ever doing what they want? The world is full of puppies and bunnies!
Ultimately, it’s all about whether you want to keep paying the lawyers. And Meta doesn’t.
Then, the question is: does Threads presage the future of social media, at least on the left? Remember, the right has Truth Social, Gab, Rumbl, Telegram, and now Twitter—all of which seem to go on and on, even though they make no money. But there will soon be no space for centrist, liberal, and left political conversation besides the comments section of electronic newsletters like this one.
This is ironic since making the dominant social media companies non-political would represent a tectonic historical change. Arguably, social media was political from its inception—or rather, political consultants began to toy with how the increasing ubiquity of computers in the home could extend the reach and messaging generated by a political campaign.
Almost simultaneously, grassroots users started to realize the thrill of being in critical dialogue with political campaigns. That big “Aha!” moment when political consultants realized that they not only needed to use the digital to promote their clients but take control of the digital dialogue was Arizona Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential Republican primary run, a race that he lost to former Texas Governor George W. Bush.
Readers of my book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020) know that McCain’s political consultant in 2000, Mike Murphy, sought to bridge the gap between what McCain was like in person—brash, over-frank, sometimes racist, and a purveyor of so-called “straight talk”—with how the media produced a candidate. So, in addition to giving reporters access to McCain, Murphy also strove to provide ordinary people that access too—on radio and television call-in shows and, most importantly, on the then-fledgling technology of web streaming.
It’s astonishing how quickly political social media took off and then how quickly it went wrong. In Political Junkies, I recount how, in 2004, political consultant Joe Trippi harnessed every web tool at his command: email, blogging, the internet, and a site called MeetUp.com that pulled left partisans together in places the Democrats were not even competing. And Trippi’s digital team, co-captained by the now-legendary progressive Zephyr Teachout and building from MoveOn.org’s design, more or less invented the campaign fundraising email as it exists today.
In 2008, Dean, now chair of the Democratic National Committee, brought the bold approach of campaigning in all 50 states, digital fundraising, and data collection to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory. By this time, Facebook, founded in 2004, had opened up to the general public, putting pre-existing social networks in play. YouTube had been hosting “the Obama Girl,” perhaps the internet’s first political meme, for a year, giving Obama a following there, while Reddit, founded in 2005, with a stripped-down interface that mimicked early communities on AOL, Compaq, and even The Well, was bringing old-school keyboard warriors into the fray.
“Crush on Obama,” dir. Ben Relles and starring Amber Lee Ettinger (2007)
It worked. And then it turned bad so quickly. Why? Because our story about the internet as a progressive space was flawed, to begin with: it both took at face value the tech industry’s aspirational and self-congratulatory propaganda about themselves as inherently progressive and democratic. It presumed that the Dean, and the historic Obama, candidacies were a natural outcome of a “progressive internet.” But in fact, the extreme right was online and networked all along.
We now know from historian Kathleen Belew’s research that some of the first political groups to mobilize using computer networking were white supremacists and militias, of which today’s far right are the ideological and technological progeny. As I document in my book, we also know that the smears against Bill and Hillary Clinton were incubated, not just in printed media and later on Fox News, but on a Reddit-like forum called FreeRepublic.com, which also cataloged and disseminated conspiracy theories.
And we also know this: the same internet that helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 created a surprisingly robust, libertarian Ron Paul campaign. It was a presidential bid that was networked with far-right websites like the fascist Daily Stormer and laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010.
Meanwhile, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the right-wing media sphere were porous and ripe for exploitation by not just right-wing partisans but also disinformation experts and grifters spreading fake news for clicks. As a people, Americans had moved their political conversations to the internet, and internet companies’ eyes were on the dollar, not on democracy. Journalists grabbed stories from social media and tailored their own reporting to generate clicks. Political consultants and disinformation specialists became experts in creating and destroying political communities—all for the clicks.
It’s easy to ask for, but social media moderation is expensive and time-consuming, which breaks the cardinal rule of tech companies: it’s about the money, honey. No one wants to pay, or take responsibility, for controlling hate speech and lies, much less suffer the reputational consequences of being characterized by the right as anti-free speech. Jack Dorsey’s Blue Sky users currently have their knickers in a twist because the app launched without a moderation and safety committee. Still, I suspect this was intentional, not an oversight. This is, after all, the man who is backing conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for president.
The social media platforms that survive the current, troubling moment and wish to serve a non-right-wing user base will have two choices. The first will be to do politics and remain relatively modest, serve narrow communities of interest, and rely (as early internet forums did) on self-appointed moderators to maintain a fascist, bot, and spam-free atmosphere. The second option will be to abandon the democracy-nurturing ideals of the early internet, become purely social media, and make gobs of money from puppies and bunnies.
In other words, we may have reached the end of a chapter in internet history—much as we did when social media was first born in 2004.
Short takes:
Cassidy Hutchinson makes bank! This poised young conservative who shivved her boss, Mark Meadows, and his boss, Donald J. Trump, by telling the truth was snagged by an agent, and a memoir of her (very short) life and (even shorter) time in government service will hit the bookstores in the fall. As Mike Allen writes at Axios, “The book is billed as the "saga of a woman whose fierce determination helped her overcome difficult childhood challenges to get her dream job" — only to face a crisis of conscience after being privy to West Wing meetings and conversations amid the Capitol attack.” The title? Enough, a word that seemed sparsely used around the Former Guy until the subpoenas started dropping. (July 13, 2023)
Alaska, a state that rarely makes it onto a national news radar, appears to have been the petri dish for a new method for undermining democracy: form a church. That’s right! As Iris Samuels reported in the Anchorage Daily News, opponents of the ranked-choice voting system (which has repeatedly returned no-nonsense conservative squish Lisa Murkowski to the Senate against the express wish of GOP extremists) formed a church “called the Ranked Choice Education Association that could have allowed donors to gain tax advantages for their contributions while skirting disclosure requirements,” Samuels writes about hte allegations that have prompted the investigation. “Those requirements apply to any group working to promote the ongoing effort to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting and open primaries through a ballot measure. The Ranked Choice Education Association appeared to engage in `the laundering of contributions’ for Alaskans for Honest Elections, the anti-ranked choice voting ballot group.” (July 6, 2023)
Democrats in Kentucky have gone to court to undo a gerrymander that cedes one House seat to them but keeps the other five safely tucked away in the GOP’s pocket. According to Matthew Klein of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, Democrats will argue “that the map needlessly splits competitive Franklin County between the 1st and 6th districts, and that it violates a state constitutional clause that `all elections shall be free and equal’ by effectively predetermining the results in all six seats. This argument worked in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The case will be heard in State Supreme Court on September 19. (July 7, 2023)
I don't have Instagram, so I would have to add that, plus Threads; so I haven't done it. The other reason is that Threads apparently does not operate in Europe. That's how I can still make twitter work for me, by switching to "following" and reading all the tweets from French politicians (my field). But otherwise, with Europe trying to get more serious about disinformation, Twitter-Europe may also go.