Grasping at Threads and Missing Its Potential for Weaponized Information Delivery

July 20, 2023

Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.

My great grandmother, bless her, used to draw flowers in pots. She used Crayola crayons. Her “style” reminded me of a ball of tangled threat. Examples of her work are lost to time. But MidJourney produced this image which is somewhat similar to how she depicted blooms:

This is a rather uninspiring ball of thread generated by the once-creative MidJourney. Perhaps the system is getting tired?

Keep in mind I am recounting what I recall when I was in grade school in the early 1950s. I thought of these tangled images when I read “Engagement on Instagram’s Threads Has Cratered.” The article suggests that users are losing interest in the Zuck’s ball of thread. I noted this statement:

Time spent on the app dropped over 50% from 20 minutes to 8 minutes, analysts found.

I have spent some time with analysts in my career. I know that data can be as malleable as another toy in a child’s box of playthings; specifically, the delightfully named and presumably non-toxic Play-Doh.

The article offers this information too:

Threads was unveiled as Meta’s Twitter killer and became available for download in the U.S. on July 5, and since then, the platform has garnered well over 100 million users, who are able to access it directly from Instagram. The app has not come without its fair share of issues, however.

Threads — particularly when tangled up — can be a mess. But the Zuckbook has billions of users of its properties. A new service taps an installed base and has a trampoline effect. When I was young, trampolines were interesting for a short period of time. The article is not exactly gleeful, but I detected some negativity toward the Zuck’s most recent innovation in me-too technology.

Now back to my great-grandmother (bless her, of course). She took the notion of tangled thread and converted them into flower blossoms. My opinion is that Threads will become another service used by actors less benign that my great-grandmother (bless her again). The ability to generate weaponized information, link to those little packets of badness, and augment other content is going to be of interest to some entities.

A free social media service can deliver considerable value to a certain segment of online users. The Silicon Valley “real” news folks may be writing about threads to say, “The Zuck’s Thread service is a tangled mess.” The more important angle, in my opinion, is that it provides another, possibly quite useful service to those who seek to cause effects not nearly as much fun as saying, “Zuck’s folly flops.” It may, but in the meantime, Threads warrants close observation, not Play-Doh data. Perhaps those wrestling with VPN bans will explore technical options for bypassing packet inspection, IP blocks, port blocks, Fiverr gig workers, or colleagues in the US?

Stephen E Arnold, July 20, 2023

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Social Media

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.