Conservatives Immediately Report Censorship On Meta’s Twitter Competitor ‘Threads’

Numerous conservative accounts have been slapped with “warning” labels on launch day of Meta’s “Threads” app, which has been billed as a competitor to Twitter. Elon Musk’s Twitter has already threatened Mark Zuckerberg’s company with legal action, accusing them of poaching former Twitter employees to develop the new platform.

Threads, a text-based platform with many similarities to Twitter, reported more than 30 million sign-ups within 24 hours of its debut on Thursday. Meta has described the new platform as, “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”

Threads was partly built by the Instagram team, meaning that Instagram users can log into the app through their Instagram account.

Immediately after launch, a number of high-profile conservative politicians and influencers have reported censorship that closely resembles content suppression methods used by Twitter prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition. Accounts have been slapped with “warning” labels that inform perspective followers that the account they are browsing has been known to publish “false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against community guidelines.

Affected accounts include conservative radio host Brandon Tatum, social media influencer DC Draino, former President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., and several others.

If you launch a so called “Twitter Killer” that censors people the second they join the app, it’s not really a “Twitter Killer” pic.twitter.com/kOq4KB5inR

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) July 6, 2023

Threads has been heavily criticized by Twitter owner Elon Musk, who has accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of stealing confidential company information by poaching former employees. Soon after the app’s launch, Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that Meta cease using any of Twitter’s trade secrets or confidential information.

The letter went on to accuse Meta of utilizing Twitter’s intellectual property in violation of state and federal laws. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk wrote in a tweet Friday. Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, later denied that any former Twitter engineers were used when creating the app.

Threads has attracted a number of high-profile figures and brands in its first day of launch, though Meta has not provided a timetable as to when they expect it to be profitable. The project also lacks a number of features, including a web app.