Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.

“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”

Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day. “I was excited by search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in covid, I came up with no search results.”

Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick. Hospitalizations jumped nearly 16 percent in the United States last week and have been rising steadily since July, according to CDC data, though they remain less than what they were for the comparable week a year ago. Deaths are less than a quarter of what they were year to year, CDC statistics show.

(OP: Sorry, paywall, can’t find another source yet. Someone got an archive?)

  • Infynis@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m surprised people are criticizing this. Facebook was the cause of a lot of deaths the first time around. This seems like an attempt to prevent the spread of misinformation

    • Nougat@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      ::taps forehead:: Can’t be spreading misinformation if you don’t allow people to search for any information.

      • CaptObvious
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Trump’s solution to rising case counts in 2020: Stop counting. Problem solved. /smh

    • Steeve@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      This community loses all critical thinking skills as soon as the title mentions Meta or Google lol