White House Joins Threads, Amid X Extremist Content Row
US political leadership including the President, White House, and others creates accounts on Meta’s Threads platform
The Biden Administration has confirmed this week it is creating social media accounts on Threads – days after it criticised X (aka Twitter) owner Elon Musk.
The White House on Monday launched its own official Threads account, as well as creating Threads accounts for the president, first lady, vice president, and second gentleman.
Additionally, personal Thread accounts will also be launched for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over the coming weeks.
Anti-semitic post
The White House reportedly said the move had been in the process for a number of weeks now.
But the decision to launch accounts on a rival platform to X (Twitter), comes just days after Elon Musk was fiercely criticised for his amplification of an anti-semitic post.
Last Friday Musk again courted controversy when he explicitly endorsed an anti-semitic conspiracy theory. The account @breakingbaht suggested that anti-semitism was carried out by minorities and claimed the Jews were to blame.
That conspiracy theory contends that Jewish people and the left are engineering an ethnic and cultural replacement of the white population with non-white immigrants.
Musk replied: “You have said the actual truth.”
White House condemnation
This provoked a stinging denunciation from the White House last Friday.
The White House condemned Elon Musk’s endorsement of what it called a “hideous” anti-semitic conspiracy theory on X, Reuters noted as the time.
The White House reportedly accused Musk of an “abhorrent promotion of anti-semitic and racist hate” that “runs against our core values as Americans.”
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie … one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates reportedly said, referring to the 7 October attack by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas on Israel.
Also last Friday Twitter was hit with a major advertiser exodus when Media Matters for America, found adverts from IBM, Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) appearing alongside extremist content that praised Adolf Hitler.
Elon Musk on Monday filed a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters in response to the advertising pull out.
Threads accounts
The decision by the Biden administration and White House to create accounts on Threads will be welcome news for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Platforms.
Threads had launched in July and upon its release, Threads witnessed surging user demand, and it quickly grew its user base to 112 million.
But actual usage of Threads has been a problem, and Mark Zuckerberg has subsequently admitted that the honeymoon phase of Threads was over when he confirmed the app had lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its launch.
That said, retention of users was better than executives had expected, though it was “not perfect,” Zuckerberg said a few months ago.
Therefore the arrival of the political leadership of the United States onto the Threads platform will be welcomed by Meta’s senior management, and will add to the platform’s credibility going forward.
It should be also noted that President Joe Biden ‘s 2024 campaign had also launched an account on Donald Trump ‘s Truth Social platform back in October.
That move was an attempt to poke online fun at the Republican candidate he could potentially face again in the US Presidential election in 2024.
