My recent post on Meta was timely, given that they’ve just launched their new Twitter competitor, Threads. Thanks to Elon’s best efforts to run twitter into the ground, Mark Zuckerberg obviously see this an opportunity to spread his data grabbing tendrils even further.
I think it can only be seen as bad news for kinky people and sex workers who use social media. As I wrote before, Meta is famously anti-adult content. There’s zero chance that the kind of adult content I follow on Twitter is going to be allowed on Threads. Users and advertising dollars flowing to it, combined with Elon’s incompetent Twitter leadership, could end up driving the only adult ‘friendly’ social media site out of business. The idea of Elon Musk losing a ton of money because of that is highly entertaining, but not so entertaining I think it’s worth losing Twitter over.
If you are thinking of signing up for Threads, be aware of the degree of data mining that Meta do. They’ll look at anything they can find – contacts, cell location, wifi networks, account data – to try and build their graph of the world. While you might want to keep kinky and vanilla accounts separate, their goal is to connect everything they can about you, which can lead to very bad outcomes.
To finish a gloomy post, let’s use a happier picture, featuring a very different kind of rope threads. This is from another social media site that fell on hard days – Tumblr. More specifically it’s from the Dudes in Distress tumblr, which is still around but hasn’t been updated in 6+ years.