What The Hell Are We Doing?

Daniel Spielberger unravels why media workers should be wary of Threads, Meta’s latest Twitter clone.

Here we go again. Last Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg unleashed Threads — the latest Twitter-clone-from-hell. As Elon Musk’s Twitter continues its disastrous descent into irrelevance, a crop of imitators have sprung offering the illusion of a sanctuary for the chronically online. What gives Threads a leg up on the competition, however, is that it’s backed by Meta (Zuck has made it so you can seamlessly create a profile using your Instagram account and import followers). According to the Meta CEO, 70 million users signed up within a day. Threads, with its rapidly expanding user base, may seem like an alluring option for media workers who just want to use a platform to drive up engagement on their content. Since I can’t be an elusive bearded recluse who still manages to get people to read my work without self-promotion, I, too, am twiddling my thumbs on Threads, competing with Kris Jenner’s yacht posts and hoping for the best. But let’s slow down and unpack the actual implications of forking over more power to Daddy Meta.

On June 22, Meta announced that it will remove news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada after the government signed the Online News Act, a law that would require tech companies like Meta and Google to pay a portion of their ad revenue to news outlets. A similar piece of legislation recently passed the California Assembly. These bills are modeled after legislation that passed in Australia in 2021 and aim to solve the ominous reality that news outlets can’t find a viable path to monetizing online content with tech behemoths eating up the majority of ad dollars. Though there are legitimate criticisms of these bills, such as their potential prioritization of larger outlets, neither Meta nor Google are concerned with that. Rather, once again, they are showing their true colors by flagrantly being concerned with their bottom line. 

According to Brian Merchant, a Los Angeles Times tech columnist who has covered the Online News Act, Meta is likely playing hard ball with the Canadian government. He pointed to how, in 2021, in an effort to extract concessions from the Australian government, Meta similarly threatened to pull all news content from the country. Ultimately, Merchant believes Meta is bluffing and lawmakers should “stick to their guns.” In response to Meta, the Canadian government has stopped running advertisements on Facebook and Instagram. 

“I think even Facebook and Google know that they need to have news on their platforms. It’s such a core part of what they do,” Merchant told Study Hall, stressing how useless both Google and Facebook would be if news items couldn’t be indexed or shared. 

Supriya Dwivedi, director of policy and engagement at the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University, told Study Hall that “it’s disappointing but I don’t think it’s surprising that they have gone this route.” She noted how in 2021, when Meta pulled news from their products in Australia, the country was in the midst of wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic and according to Meta whistleblowers who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, the company was intentionally trying to destabilize the country. Now, in Canada, Meta is pulling a page from its own “established playbook,” according to Dwivedi.   

“This isn’t really about Canada, like we’re a relatively small market,” she said. “Meta right now is engaged in the longer game and they’re using Canada as a warning shot to other jurisdictions that are currently in the throes of enacting their own policies that are very similar to the Online News Act.” 

Merchant believes that Threads presents a “good opportunity” for news organizations to hold firm against Meta, a company that profited from media content while refusing to pay their fair share to keep the media alive. 

“Maybe it’s time for a divorce” between journalists and Meta, Bill Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, told Study Hall. “Facebook is less interested in the news business and less eager to support journalism than they purported to be a few years ago. They also don’t drive as much traffic as they used to.” 

These revenue sharing laws may mitigate the collapse of digital media (the Canadian government estimated it would have brought $329 million in annual revenue to newsrooms). However, the fact that Meta and Google have both newsrooms and their audience at their whim should be alarming.  

For all their blatant faults, Twitter, Facebook, and Google at least are link-friendly platforms that allow users to venture out of their bubble to discover new content. Threads, on the other hand, seems to be a microblogging companion piece to Instagram, which privileges the famous and beautiful (i.e. those with built-in audiences). Threads will likely comprise of hair vitamin influencers waxing poetic about keeping up with #legday in the Bahamas and you, as a media worker, will have to duke it out with them for the same set of eyeballs. Best of luck. As Benjamin Goggin, a deputy tech editor at NBC News, pointed out in a post on the app, Threads is “useless for news” because there’s no search function or trending topics feature. 

“We were literally just that desperate that we all jumped ship to the biggest most basic Twitter copycat that actually just doesn’t have utility for us, except to just let us post to followers, like every other platform,” he wrote on Threads. 

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said that creating space for “politics and hard news” isn’t a priority for the Threads team. So, what is it exactly for? The utility of this platform may not actually matter because Threads is probably just a pawn in a larger Chess game between two megalomaniac billionaires.

On the day following the launch of Meta’s new product, there was a recurring online joke about how stressed social media managers must be. Zuck tweeted a Spider-Man copycat meme, joining in on the fun. But the humor obscures the sheer cowardice of the moment: do we really have to do this?

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer is leaving her role as senior editor at Insider.
—Edward Ongweso Jr. is now the finance editor at Logic Magazine.
—Alejandra Borunda joined NPR’s climate desk and will be covering the “intersection of climate change and health.”
—Sinobia Aiden is leaving her role as a producer at POLITICO to start a new position as social media manager at The Messenger.
—Alex Arriaga and Arabella Saunders have joined New York Focus. Arriaga will be their new audience engagement editor, while Saunders will be covering economic development. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE 

—G/O Media has started publishing AI content on their verticals even after their union’s uproar. Last week, Gizmodo published an AI-generated chronological list of Star Wars films with the help of Gizmodo Bot. Although this whole scenario is plucked from a scary sci-fi dystopia, the technology clearly can’t replace living, breathing writers. Gizmodo Bot’s first article was filled with a myriad of errors. For one, it wasn’t chronological. I don’t know, publishing unfactual content that gets widely mocked online doesn’t seem worth it!
—The New York Times is disbanding its sports department, which employs 35 journalists and editors, and moving all sports coverage into The Athletic, a website it purchased last year for $550 million. The Athletic, which employs 400 staffers (and recently laid off 20 reporters), isn’t unionized, though the Times sports desk staffers are. Before the news became public, the department sent a letter signed by 28 writers and editors to Times leadership over the weekend asking for answers about the future of the section.
—According to Semafor, ABC News is investigating complaints at Good Morning America that executive producer Simone Swink has favored white correspondents on the show. Some at the network were skeptical of the complaints.
—The Los Angeles Times has launched De Los, a new initiative focused on Latino culture and identity. The vertical has put together a team of Latino reporters, editors, illustrators, and other creatives to focus on stories both about and for Latino communities.