Civil Rights Groups Warn of Hate Speech Problem in Threads

Meta’s new social platform, Threads, has faced criticism in its first week of launch for failing to address concerns about hate speech and extremist accounts. Advocates and civil rights groups have expressed disappointment with the absence of accessibility features and community policies that outline how the platform will tackle these issues.

Civil Rights Groups Warn of Hate Speech Problem in Threads

In a letter released by 24 civil rights, digital justice, and pro-democracy organizations — including nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and GLAAD— the platform’s parent company is criticized for taking a step backwards in relation to creating a safer digital environment for users.

See Also: Apple Joins Threads as New Platform Now Has More than 100 Million Users

Rather than strengthen your policies, Threads has taken actions doing the opposite, by purposefully not extending Instagram’s fact-checking program to the platform and capitulating to bad actors, and by removing a policy to warn users when they are attempting to follow a serial misinformer. Without clear guardrails against future incitement of violence, it is unclear if Meta is prepared to protect users from high-profile purveyors of election disinformation who violate the platform’s written policies. To date, the platform remains without even the most basic tools for researchers to be able to analyze activity on Threads. Finally, Meta rolled out Threads at the same time that you have been laying off content moderators and civic engagement teams meant to curb the spread of disinformation on the platform.

The letter also noted “neo-Nazi rhetoric, election lies, COVID and climate change denialism, and more toxicity” on the new platform, including accounts posting “bigoted slurs, election denial, COVID-19 conspiracies, targeted harassment of and denial of trans individuals’ existence, misogyny, and more.”

According to a July report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Meta flagship Facebook is the highest-reported platform where hate and harassment occur. In addition, Instagram and Facebook both received failing grades in GLAAD’s 2023 Social Media Safety Index, while Twitter was named least safe.