The White House on Monday launched accounts on Meta’s Threads service for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, gaining a sizable following on an app that competes with Elon Musk’s X.
Accounts on Threads were also established for the first lady and second gentleman as well as for the White House itself. Biden’s account racked up 2 million followers within an hour of its debut.
The Threads push comes after Musk last week called an antisemitic conspiracy theory “the actual truth” on X to his 163 million listed followers. He also said some “Jewish communities” promote “anti-white” messaging and views, calling out the Anti-Defamation League and minorities. White House officials repeatedly rebuked Musk for what they called “anti-semitic rhetoric” on X over the last week.
Several major advertisers including Apple and Disney subsequently paused their spending on X. Musk defended himself on Sunday, without apologizing or rescinding his statements.
There’s a lot of criticism of this move which I think is unwarranted.
Because of Musk’s statements, continuing to post on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is becoming less and less tenable for a lot of people.
But the White House isn’t concerned with which competitor will rise to take its place. They’re not interested in supporting a corporation vs. a competitive startup. The White House is solely interested in reaching the highest number of people possible with official communications. And for better or worse, Threads is going to be the closest thing to having an active userbase that’s anywhere close to the size of Twitter. Mastodon as a whole wouldn’t even come close; Mastodon has about 1.8 million users/month. Biden got that on Threads in under an hour.
I agree with the sentiment, but they could just do both. It’s not like they are mutually exclusive.
If they want to reach more people, Mastadon will help them do it.
Haven’t looked into Mastodon too much, but would it be able to handle that much traffic? I remember some of the Lemmy instances had issues when reddit dropped 3rd party API.
I can’t imagine people flooding Mastodon with new signups and traffic just to follow Biden. There would likely be a little bump as it gets reported and more people get curious, but most would likely be more along the lines of “oh that’s nice” and go right back to Twitter/threads.
I sorta think, had this happened in the run-up to 2008, it’s possible that people might have flooded it to follow Obama, but Biden doesn’t have anywhere near the pull with young voters that Obama had. Back then we voted for Obama. Now we vote against Trump, and Biden just happens to be the beneficiary. No one is going to change their online presence just because he moved his soapbox.
If European governments can manage to join Mastodon, the Biden administration has no excuse.
If someone told you that you obtain 15 units per hour or 1 unit per hour and the number of units you acquire decide whether or not you exist or are thrown in prison for charges that have not been made up yet, which would you choose? I’d start with the 15, and if I have enough hours left, add in the 1 after.
Username checks out, I guess.
Contrary to your apparent worldview, however, joining Threads and Mastodon is not an either-or choice. Also, I’m pretty sure the Federal freakin’ government would have plenty of manpower to set up a Mastodon account for Biden (or an entire mastodon.gov instance for that matter, which would be the right way to do it) if whoever is in charge of social media actually cared about doing so.
My comment specifically said I’d do both. Yours just assumed the man hours were automatically there.
Wait I forgot to be condescending like you. Apparently according to your world view, reading comprehension isn’t required, just attacking logical choices.
I’m not arguing against Threads being a wider audience, but I do just want to point out that many people may be auto-following. I keep seeing notifications from Threads that I’m now following someone because I was previously already following them (on FB, I guess), and I haven’t opened Threads in a while.
I can’t believe this is the only sane take in the thread so far.