Biden joins Meta's Threads after White House rebukes Elon Musk for ‘anti-semitic rhetoric’ on X
The White House on Monday launched accounts on Meta’s Threads service for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, gaining a sizable following on an app that competes with Elon Musk’s X.
Accounts on Threads were also established for the first lady and second gentleman as well as for the White House itself. Biden’s account racked up 2 million followers within an hour of its debut.
The Threads push comes after Musk last week called an antisemitic conspiracy theory “the actual truth” on X to his 163 million listed followers. He also said some “Jewish communities” promote “anti-white” messaging and views, calling out the Anti-Defamation League and minorities. White House officials repeatedly rebuked Musk for what they called “anti-semitic rhetoric” on X over the last week.
Several major advertisers including Apple and Disney subsequently paused their spending on X. Musk defended himself on Sunday, without apologizing or rescinding his statements.
Woulda been cooler if they spun up a US government Mastodon instance and made his account there, but this is certainly a step in the right direction
Threads will eventually add activitypub, so someone with sway will learn about mastodon soon enough
I kinda thought it would have happened by now, I hope they aren't quietly shelving development like Tumblr did
Considering much of the Fediverse immediately pledged not to federate with them (for good reason, frankly), maybe they took the hint?
I hope they're still working on it though because I would like to have the option to follow the people who use Threads while not using Threads myself.
Well just last week they finally made it possible to delete your threads account without deleting your instagram account. Something tells me that the Zucc isn't very invested in the platform
After seeing everything Musk is doing to seemingly destroy twitter from within in real time, if Zucc isn't doing everything short of zapping his employees with a cattle prod in order to lure Twitter users to Threads right now when Twitter is at its weakest, he's just as fucking stupid as Musk is.
Hopefully having the president on the platform will help draw his attention towards it.
Based on my experience in lemmy, if you are avoiding antisemitism, mastodon probably isn't a good place to go.
Lemmy is probably still one of the best I've seen; but that's also a reallyyy low bar.
There is a lot of anti-Israel on lemmy, but I believe in good faith it isn't coming from a core place of anti-semitism. Like like, anti-US if anything.
People jump to conclusions real fuckin fast on here, so let me put a disclaimer:
The Palestinian people, and the Israeli people, are ultimately the victims of everything that is happening and has happened in recent months. The Israeli government, and Hamas, are both terrorist organizations that need to be stopped.
That out of the way, I agree with you. There are people on here that express legitimate grievances with Israel, and a lot of folks will immediately counter that they must be supporting Hamas.
My anti-Israel stance is about the shitty humans in charge of its current regime and their abhorrent human rights abuses. It has nothing to do with the religion of anyone involved, except to the extent that all fundamentalism is bad.. my heart goes out to all the Israelis who have been hurt by their government's bad decisions - which includes cultivating a violent extremist opposition allowing them to justify violence of their own. The US uses the same playbook, and I condemn it for that too.
Are you confusing animtisem with being against a horrific genocide that has being going on for decades? A lot of Americans don't seem to be able to make the destination. Hamas is a shockingly disgusting terrorist group, that doesn't mean Israel isn't a shockingly disgusting terrorist state. Being anti Israel is not the same as being anti Jewish
There's still a significant portion that are straight up hamas apologists, and straight up anti-semitists that use the "I'm criticizing Israel, not jews" just like "I'm not racist, I have a black friend."
Israeli is not the same as Jewish, as much as the the Israelis want to push that narrative to claim anyone who criticises their genocide is an anti-semite.
It is most likely because they can be officially verified on Threads and limit a situation of impersonation (if I had to guess). I don’t use threads so idk but I it would be a major concern to be spoofed which is a lot easier on decentralized instances at the moment.
Does anyone know if there is a verified focused instance that’s invite only and has a vetting process for notable people?
I'm pretty sure having an account on (a hypothetical) mastodon.gov would be plenty of verification!
You can be verified on Mastodon, too. You just have to put a line of html on a website you control and you are verified by that website. For most of us, that is of limited use. I'm verified by my Github account which is also an anonymous alias (I enjoy my privacy), but having a verified link to whitehouse.gov would be pretty definitive.
I mean, who is going to claim that POTUS@whitehouse.gov or POTUS@mastodon.us.gov would be any other Mastodon user? Presumably any official US government mastodon or lemmy instance wouldn't allow for public signups.