Months after the government officially ended the public health emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Tech is still monitoring posts mentioning COVID. Instagram’s messaging app Threads is blocking search results for key COVID-related terms, including “COVID,” “long COVID” and “vaccines.”
Results for those searches will come up as blocked and direct users to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.
According to Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Threads will intentionally censor search results for terms that could show sensitive content.
Searches for words like “nude,” “porn,” or “sex” will show up as blocked, and now “vaccine,” “vaccination” and “coronavirus” have been grouped in that same category.
This new search function was rolled out during the week of Sept. 3. Meta says it is refining the tool and will update its “search functionality” once the company is confident in the quality of the results.
The tool has been met with criticism, including from some health workers who argue that the site is taking away a resource of information as new COVID variants are starting to circulate.
“Long COVID” — one of the phrases being blocked in Thread’s searches — was originally discovered by people sharing symptoms online. The term was first coined by a user on Twitter — now known as X — before being used by the CDC.
With the new search feature, users will not be able to read through posts that mention the word.
Meta has decided that the risk of disinformation outweighs the benefit of any information at this time.
This is another element in part of a larger debate that Straight Arrow News has been covering on whether social media’s censorship of COVID posts is protecting Americans from false information or encroaching on the principle of free speech.
