Biden joins Meta's Threads after White House rebukes Elon Musk for ‘anti-semitic rhetoric’ on X

politics @lemmy.world – 305 points – 11 months ago

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

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.

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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.

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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?

It is most likely because they can be officially verified on Threads

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.

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Facebook: oh shit we left that on

There's a lot of criticism of this move which I think is unwarranted.

Because of Musk's statements, continuing to post on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is becoming less and less tenable for a lot of people.

But the White House isn't concerned with which competitor will rise to take its place. They're not interested in supporting a corporation vs. a competitive startup. The White House is solely interested in reaching the highest number of people possible with official communications. And for better or worse, Threads is going to be the closest thing to having an active userbase that's anywhere close to the size of Twitter. Mastodon as a whole wouldn't even come close; Mastodon has about 1.8 million users/month. Biden got that on Threads in under an hour.

I agree with the sentiment, but they could just do both. It's not like they are mutually exclusive.

If they want to reach more people, Mastadon will help them do it.

Haven't looked into Mastodon too much, but would it be able to handle that much traffic? I remember some of the Lemmy instances had issues when reddit dropped 3rd party API.

I can't imagine people flooding Mastodon with new signups and traffic just to follow Biden. There would likely be a little bump as it gets reported and more people get curious, but most would likely be more along the lines of "oh that's nice" and go right back to Twitter/threads.

I sorta think, had this happened in the run-up to 2008, it's possible that people might have flooded it to follow Obama, but Biden doesn't have anywhere near the pull with young voters that Obama had. Back then we voted for Obama. Now we vote against Trump, and Biden just happens to be the beneficiary. No one is going to change their online presence just because he moved his soapbox.

If European governments can manage to join Mastodon, the Biden administration has no excuse.

If someone told you that you obtain 15 units per hour or 1 unit per hour and the number of units you acquire decide whether or not you exist or are thrown in prison for charges that have not been made up yet, which would you choose? I'd start with the 15, and if I have enough hours left, add in the 1 after.

Username checks out, I guess.

Contrary to your apparent worldview, however, joining Threads and Mastodon is not an either-or choice. Also, I'm pretty sure the Federal freakin' government would have plenty of manpower to set up a Mastodon account for Biden (or an entire mastodon.gov instance for that matter, which would be the right way to do it) if whoever is in charge of social media actually cared about doing so.

My comment specifically said I'd do both. Yours just assumed the man hours were automatically there.

Wait I forgot to be condescending like you. Apparently according to your world view, reading comprehension isn't required, just attacking logical choices.

I'm not arguing against Threads being a wider audience, but I do just want to point out that many people may be auto-following. I keep seeing notifications from Threads that I'm now following someone because I was previously already following them (on FB, I guess), and I haven't opened Threads in a while.

I can't believe this is the only sane take in the thread so far.

Am I disappointed it's still a shitty social media company? Yes.

But is this a good thing? Absolutely. Biden moving to threads gives threads more legitimacy as a competitor. When more groups start using something other than Twitter for communication, Twitter can finally die.