I deleted my Threads account today. Meta’s previous announcements about the end of third-party fact-checking and changes to moderation rules (to enable more abuse of people from marginalized communities on its platforms) and Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko speaking out regarding the danger of the changes prompted me to turn off the fediverse-sharing feature on my Threads account. At the time, I was unsure if I would continue to have a Threads account.
Meta’s announcement today that they’re immediately terminating DEI programs inside the company gave me the push I needed to delete my account from an app that frankly isn’t that good. The tech industry I’ve worked in since before Facebook ever existed didn’t treat people who weren’t white and male very well for decades before that. DEI efforts across the tech industry were largely belated, token efforts at most companies, that didn’t meaningfully increase the diversity of rank-and-file employees or leadership. Meta retreating from DEI feels like yet another slap at black folks who have already endured far more than enough between the death of affirmative action in higher education, a legal settlement that literally prevents black people from giving away their own money to black women the rest of the venture capital industry ignores, the outcome of the presidential election, and everything else that comes along with what we should have left behind from Trump’s first term. I don’t even want to imagine how awful it must have been for Meta’s now-former chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, to see Mark Zuckerberg casually nuke a decade of her work.
What’s next (as detailed in an earlier post) is more financial support for decentralized social media and efforts to create more hospitable online spaces for black folks (like Blacksky) and other marginalized communities that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, (and others) have targeted for abuse. My Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) administrators opted to defederate from Threads in the interest of protecting their users who are part of marginalized communities. I expect many other Mastodon instances of varying sizes to follow suit, or apply some moderation to Threads accounts. Deleting other Meta accounts (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is much harder than deleting Threads because of how many meaningful relationships I have with people that social media makes it easier to maintain. Perhaps this will be a year of seriously seeking alternatives–and making more efforts to connect in real life.