Like millions of internet users, I rushed to Threads in the not-at-all-secret hope of escaping the mess that Twitter has become since Elon Musk made it his expensive babble.
Like millions of others, I was just waiting for an opportunity to escape the hordes of hackers and trolls that swarm, tweet and shout on Twitter. But I fear very much that I will fall from Charybdis to Scylla.
Do you know this expression? It designates a situation where, in wanting to avoid one misfortune, one is struck by another, even greater one. Charybdis and Scylla are two sea monsters from Greek mythology. The first is a swirling chasm that sucks everything in. The second, a steep reef where ships will crash. In L’Odyssey of Homer, Odysseus goes from one to the other, and it ends rather badly for his crew.
In short, I am very much afraid, I wrote, of falling from Charybdis to Scylla. After all, I go from one web giant to another. Two voracious monsters who are equal and who swallow everything. Without reporting to anyone. The consequences don’t matter.
Threads’ instant success was down to Elon Musk’s apparent determination to smash his new toy with bad decisions. When he showed the door to his content moderation teams, for example. Or, worse still, when he threw it wide open to conspiracy theorists of all stripes.
Result, it’s a mess on Twitter. We can’t take it anymore. We’re ready to do anything to stop it – even handing over our data to a man almost as rich and barely less unsympathetic as Elon Musk: Mark Zuckerberg.
We are ready to forget the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that of the Facebook Files1 and toxic misinformation that is also spreading on Meta platforms. We think that at least there are no trolls on Threads. At least not yet…
The already bleak situation can only get worse if Meta cuts access to news produced by Canadian media on Threads, as it threatens to do on Facebook and Instagram.
Nearly 30% of Canadians use Facebook to get information.
If journalistic content disappears overnight, where, and above all how, will these people get their information? How many of them will be satisfied with rumors and insignificance? How much fake news will fill the void left by the suppression of real reporting?
Meta and Google are threatening to remove news from their websites in protest of a federal law that would force them to share a small slice of their gigantic advertising pie with Canadian media.
“They made the wrong choice by attacking Canada,” Justin Trudeau warned on Wednesday. “I know that Canadians are not going to be intimidated by American billionaires who want to harm our democracy. »
The Prime Minister is right: depriving Canadians of access to a quality, free and independent press would undoubtedly harm the democratic health of the country. Yet this is what the giants of Silicon Valley are threatening to do, out of sheer greed.
These insatiable monsters create nothing. They gobble up journalistic content produced by others, spit it out on their platforms and enrich themselves in the process, thanks to the advertising revenue generated by this free, constantly renewed material.
As a result, from one end of the country to the other, newspapers are sinking. The web giants now monopolize 80% of digital advertisements, leaving only crumbs to the media – which must pay their journalists. Over the past few years, 450 newsrooms have closed. It’s catastrophic – and not just for the thousands of reporters who find themselves unemployed.
We now know too well that social networks create a toxic addiction, especially among young people. We know that their algorithms push content that divides society.
We know that Meta, perfectly aware of the situation, has long refused to modify these damn algorithms, because its users would have spent less time on its platforms and would therefore have been less exposed to its advertising content.
Like a tobacconist2 which continued to sell its product despite knowing it was toxic, Meta refused to make Facebook less addictive, because it also made it pay less.
Scalded by the critics of the last few years, Meta is now trying to distance itself from the news and the controversies3 policies. But it continues to make us addicted. Threads uses Instagram’s algorithm to force-feed us the content most likely to appeal to us. To encourage us to “scroll” to infinity, it will give us exactly what we want, even without admitting it too much. Cat videos. Rises of milk. Juicy gossip. But no news, or very little.
With a little luck, we will be treated to the most absurd duel between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: a mixed martial arts fight, in a cage, which could be held… at the Colosseum in Rome.
We will then be able to take the full measure of the ego of two of the richest men on the planet, who absolutely want to let us know how manly they are. If this fight does indeed end up happening, it will certainly be a circus.
But hey, bread and games, that’s what we ask for in silence, our eyes glued to our screens.