The “low-quality” suggested posts that appear to have taken over recently are being fixed by Threads.
Regardless of whether or not you have been actively using Threads, you may have noticed — as a result of its incorporation into the Instagram feed — an unsettling shift in the types of posts that the platform has been recommending over the course of the past few weeks. The best case scenario is that you are being presented with a large amount of content that is completely irrelevant to you, or interaction bait in the style of copypasta. Worst case scenario? A great deal of rhetoric that is hateful. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, issued an apology for the “low-quality recommendations” that are circulating on Threads in a brief video that was uploaded on Friday in response to a query that was posed to the Ask Me Anything feature. He also stated that the team is working on a solution to the problem.
We want people to have a positive experience on Threads, and we’ve actually had some issues over the last few weeks with low-quality recommendations’, Mosseri said, ‘things that don’t quite violate our Community Guidelines — which is where we take content down entirely — but kind of go right up to that line. An effort is being made to make it better. At this point, a significant portion of it ought to be mended. Users can “expect it to get much better over the next few weeks,” he continues, despite the fact that “there is a lot more work to do.” He says this in the following sentence. “Once more, my apologies.”
Recently, things have taken a noticeably darker turn, despite the fact that Threads already had the impression of being cluttered with posts that were intended to milk participation as new users attempt to develop followings on the social site that is still in its infancy. Suddenly, it appears that ragebait is the primary focus of attention. Users have voiced their dissatisfaction with the fact that they are being recommended an alarmingly high quantity of information that is nasty, particularly ones that are overtly transphobic. The fact that it has made its way into my personal feeds is so significant that I have the impression that I have muted more accounts on Threads in the past two weeks than I had in the preceding six months combined.
explicitly, Engadget wanted to know whether the enhancements that Mosseri highlighted will explicitly target transphobia and other forms of hate speech. Meta was asked to provide clarification on this matter. “In addition to removing content that violates our community guidelines, we are aware that some users are seeing this type of repetitive, low-quality content that they may not be interested in, and we are taking steps to address it,” a spokeswoman said in response to Mosseri’s comments. “We are taking steps to address it.”