Unless you’ve been under a rock – or unplugged due to an extended Independence Day holiday – you do know that Meta has released ‘Twitter killer’ Threads. Thirty million people signed on Day One, and it’s easy to join. No special invite required. No early adopter wait list. All you need is an Instagram account and click on the icon. You’re in!

Ah, but can you just as easily get out?

Long answer: no.  Not without deleting your Instagram account and even then, who knows what data capture threads Meta has left behind.

No matter. A new social network! A bona fide Twitter competitor and who wanted to stay on Twitter with the now demonized Elon Musk at the helm? In fact, on a listserv thread, we were asked if we were on Threads. Our response: We know too much about Mark Zuckerberg, and he already knows way too much about us, so, pass.

Then Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter killer’ Threads hits 70m sign-ups in two days. See above for ‘Data Linked to You,’ which is an inclusive list in and of itself, what to speak of the undefined ‘Other Data.’

Pass.

Said the Guardian, “Zuckerberg, chief executive of Threads and Instagram owner Meta, has said he wants to make “kindness” a focus of the app’s appeal, in a reference to concerns that the rival platform, which has more than 250 million users, has become too hostile for some.” Yet Fox Business reported that Meta’s Threads app already facing backlash for ‘silencing’ conservatives days after launch – and anyone who doesn’t go along with the talking points du jour.

“I posted a meme about Twitter being better than Threads, and they removed it after ONE MINUTE for ‘incitement to violence,’” conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair tweeted with four laughing emojis,” Fox Business noted.

Wrongthink will not be tolerated, but we suppose ‘killing with kindness,’ is acceptable in a Zuckerberg world.

Threads release to the world – or parts of the world, anyway, since Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to want to tangle with Europe’s privacy issues, and there’s a heads up for you – on the heels of “U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty having at least temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech,” as the Wall Street Journal opined (Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly. Government and social-media companies colluded to stifle dissenters who turned out to be right), pointing out that “Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.”

“In his 155-page ruling, Judge Doughty…said there is “substantial evidence” the government violated the First Amendment by engaging in a large-scale censorship campaign targeting content that questioned or countered establishment narratives on COVID-19. Doughty said the “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” wrote Children’s Health Defense (Citing ‘Orwellian’ Tactics, Federal Judge Orders White House to Stop Censoring Americans’ Social Media Posts).

As “Technology expert Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender:

“These social media firms have never been strictly private, free-market enterprises. No one can credibly say, ‘but they are private companies; they can censor whatever and whoever they want’ …These Big Digital goliaths are state apparatuses and have been since their inception. They are funded by the state, staffed by former state agents, and do the state’s bidding …The collusion between the government and these corporations amounts to fascism.”

“Elon Musk’s release of some of Twitter’s internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren’t fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy,” the WSJ continued.

And Meta hired dozens of Twitter refugees, and no doubt not limited to coders.

Social media is no doubt divisive and has greatly contributed to the lack of dialog between dissenting opinions and considering Meta/Facebook’s and pre-Musk Twitter’s policies, we can only wonder if Threads is a beacon of hope for the self-defined disenfranchised following the Musk acquisition, or a latter-day online manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome.

Online was originally about grabbing eyeballs, then advertising dollars, now as Ministries of Truth and purveyors of socially acceptable behavior/right-think . As we reported just last month, citing Wired, “The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens. A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.

““This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”

All things considered, re the government’s policy of flouting their disregard for the law, wonder if this latest court ruling will truly have an impact…

As for that listserv to which we belong, many of the members who were jumping ship from Twitter and wholeheartedly embracing Threads noted, “they already have all my information. What’s the difference?” Seriously? Given Meta’s list of ‘Data Linked to You,’ smells to us as if they’re keying up for Social Credit scores, and that Meta is positioning itself to be the holders of the keys to that kingdom, which may well give new meaning to the term, ‘hanging by a thread.’

And how many times have we warned founders as the importance of having a revenue model, for those of us who feel it prudent to peer at least ten minutes into the future before blindly signing up for whatever shiny new thing that has that has just come down the pike. Especially from any member of the tech cabal or the bro inner circle.

With his focus on generative AI, considering the enormous amounts of real-time data Zuckerberg will be able to harvest via Threads, in multiple languages, to feed his into LLaMA, let’s just say that whenever there’s an opportunity for data collection/surveillance, never count Meta out.

As of Sunday, 97 Million Users Try Meta’s Twitter Alternative, and considering the adoption rate, looks like Blue Sky ahead – but maybe not so much for Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s platform. We always do stress the importance of a name, and blue sky never lasts forever. Eventually, storm clouds do tend to roll in. That’s just the nature of things.

It doesn’t seem that ‘kindness’ is the true intention of Threads, but then again, this isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has made statements out of whole cloth and as to his choice of the name for the new app (and it is cell phone only), we know what eventually happens with threads: they do have a tendency to unravel. Onward and forward.