Threads, the soon-to-be-launched app touted by Facebook (now known as Meta) as the “sane” alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter, will — much like other Facebook apps — collect a dizzying array of details about its users.
Screenshots of the app, which is available for pre-download on the App Store, shows it will collect data on users’ health & fitness, financial information, contact information, user content, browsing history, usage data, diagnostics, purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers, sensitive info, and more.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg closeup (Anthony Quintano/Flickr)
Many other apps, including Twitter, collect data on their users, but Facebook (along with Google) is particularly notorious for it. The tech giant recently settled a class-action data privacy lawsuit in the U.S. for $725 million, and has been condemned by both Democrat and Republican lawmakers for the way it has handled user data in the past.
Thank goodness they’re so sanely run
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2023
News of Threads’ data collection policies drew a quip from Twitter owner Elon Musk: “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run.”
The phrase “sanely run” comes from a Facebook executive’s comment to employees that the company has “been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”
As Breitbart News previously reported, this is likely a euphemism for more censorship. The vast majority of complaints about Twitter in the corporate legacy media, and from politicians and regulators, stem from the fact that Elon Musk has vocally rejected the idea that social media platforms should censor their users on behalf of the political left.
In some cases, he has even indicated that he will hold the left to their own standards, such as his recent statement that the word “cisgender,” often used as a term of abuse against normal people by transgender activists, will be considered a slur on Twitter.
By opening up the Twitter Files to independent journalists, Musk has also shed light on the close collaboration between the U.S. federal government and Twitter, a relationship that is now facing scrutiny in the courts, on the grounds that the government is using social media companies to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.
The potential for Musk to upend the carefully-constructed “censorship industrial complex” of the media, deep state, and Silicon Valley has drawn intense backlash from the institutional left. Even before Musk took over, a cabal of pro-censorship NGOs issued an open letter demanding that the platform’s top advertisers intervene to stop him from reversing its Jack Dorsey-era censorship policies.
Musk’s tenure at Twitter, which led to the restoration of a number of prominent conservative accounts (including Donald Trump’s) led many leftist journalists and celebrities to quit the platform for rivals like Mastodon. Facebook is now presenting another alternative platform, although it remains to be seen whether it will be successful.
The current picture bears some similarity to the Jack Dorsey era, in which rampant anti-conservative bias on the platform led conservatives to flock to a number of competing platforms, including Gab, Parler, GETTR, and Truth Social. The only difference is that unlike conservatives, leftist users aren’t fleeing censorship and political bias — they are fleeing the lack of it.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.