It didn’t take very long for conservatives to pounce on Meta’s new Twitter competitor and accuse it of censoring a prominent conservative, forcing the social media giant to back down.
Last week, the New York Post reported that users of Instagram Threads — the upstart from Facebook’s parent company meant to take advantage of Twitter users’ discontent over the site’s Elon Musk-era problems — were offered a warning when they attempted to follow Donald Trump Jr, the eldest son of twice-impeached, twice-indicted ex-president Donald Trump.
They were asked if they were “sure” they wanted to do so, and warned that the younger Mr Trump had “repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against our Community Guidelines”.
The Trump Organization executive, who frequently posts false and inflammatory statements targeting prominent Democrats, posted a screen grab of the warning to Twitter on Thursday, around the time the new app went live.
“Threads not exactly off to a great start,” he wrote. “Hey Instagram, threads is verbal, so the whole skimpy bikini thing is not going to work so well if your influencers can’t actually formulate a sentence… IMHO you may want to rethink cutting off those who can”.
Meta communications boss Andy Stone responded that the warning “was an error and shouldn’t have happened”.
“It’s been fixed,” he added.
In response, Mr Trump replied: “Ok thanks I appreciate that”.
The frustrated would-be poster’s father was banned from Instagram and Facebook for two years after he incited a deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
On that day, a mob of the defeated president’s supporters stormed the seat of the US legislature in hopes of preventing certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
