Threads restricts Covid-related search amid spike in cases

Meta has reportedly confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms but declined to provide a list.

Instagram's text-based social media platform, Threads, recently landed in controversy, as it rolled out its revamped search function on September 8 which blocks searches related to coronavirus and other pandemic-linked queries, according to a report by the Washington Post.

Within 24 hours of the latest development, the company was mired in controversy. When users tried Threads to search for content related to “Covid” and “long Covid,” they found a blank screen with no search results, along with a pop-up linking to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the report added.

Also Read | Instagram's Threads rolls out keyword search to India, US and others

Meta has reportedly confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms but declined to provide a list. According to The Post, the words "sex," "nude," "gore," "porn," "coronavirus," "vaccines" and "vaccination" are also blocked.

“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results,” as Washington Post quoted.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify this news development.

When Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, attempted to use Threads to find research about Covid-19, something he does every day, he discovered this. “I was excited by the search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in COVID, I came up with no search results," as quoted in the report.

Public health workers have also criticized the company's decision and said the timing was particularly poor, given the current Coronavirus outbreak. According to CDC data, hospitalizations in the United States spiked nearly 16 percent last week, although they remain lower than they were a year ago for the comparable week. CDC statistics show that deaths have declined by more than a quarter compared to last year.

Julia Doubleday, outreach director at the World Health Network, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the Coronavirus, said, “Social media is a lifeline for patients, literally. Long COVID patients have died of organ failure, infections, cardiac events and more, and social media is one place they can share information. Cutting off communication between suffering and disabled patients is cruel in the extreme. It’s indefensible.”

“The decision to censor searches about COVID will make it harder for public health experts and people who work in public health to get out important info to the public about how they can protect themselves,” Tran has stated, as quoted by the Washington Post.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2021, four in 10 American adults said social media was an important source of information about Coronavirus vaccines.

“Censoring searches for COVID and long COVID will only leave an information gap that will be filled by misinformation from elsewhere,” the Washington Post quoted Tran. “The best solution is to take proactive steps to elevate multiple trusted sources and address misinformation.”

Facebook and Instagram, of which Threads is a part of, have been trying to avoid controversy on Threads. Early this July, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that Threads is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news,” and that “the goal isn’t to replace Twitter.”

However, sharing real-time news and information was key to Twitter's rise and remains its core function.

“Ever since Elon [Musk] took over Twitter, people with long COVID have been experiencing more harassment, and it’s been harder to connect on there,” said Fiona Lowenstein, editor of “The Long COVID Survival Guide,” a book about managing long COVID symptoms, as quoted in Washington Post.

“The whole reason we know about long covid in the first place is that people with long covid took to social media and started talking about their experiences,” Lowenstein said, noting that the term “long covid” itself was coined by a Twitter user before being adopted by the CDC, the World Health Organization and other health organizations.

Emily Vraga, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said the decision to block search results for important keywords “does not situate Threads as a replacement for the Twitter that once existed.”

According to Vraga, Meta appears incapable of meaningfully moderate content at scale, as indicated by the decision.

“Meta and all of its products have long had a hands-off approach,” she said. “They really don’t want to be seen as deciding truth versus not truth, and I think this is a continuation of that. They are often sidestepping the really complicated and very difficult [moderation] decisions.”

At least blocking search results for certain terms shows that Meta is considering disinformation, according to Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in technology and disinformation. However, he said blocking search terms was an imprecise moderation measure.

“All this talk about AI and large language models and all these amazing technological innovations,” he said, “and one of the top tech companies in the world is resorting to these really crude instruments for content moderation.” Farid further said the decision could be a sign that Meta “is continually not investing in doing better content moderation, so they’re resorting to this very blunt instrument,” as quoted in the report.

Ultimately, Farid said, blocking certain words from search is ineffective since users will quickly develop euphemisms and turns of phrase to avoid them.