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Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise (www.washingtonpost.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by geosoco@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines” and “vaccination” are also among blocked words.

“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”

Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use Threads to seek out research related to covid, something he says he does every day. “I was excited by search [on Threads],” he said. “When I typed in covid, I came up with no search results.”

Other public health workers criticized the company’s decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick. Hospitalizations jumped nearly 16 percent in the United States last week and have been rising steadily since July, according to CDC data, though they remain less than what they were for the comparable week a year ago. Deaths are less than a quarter of what they were year to year, CDC statistics show.

(OP: Sorry, paywall, can't find another source yet. Someone got an archive?)

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[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

When vaccines for COVID rolled out in Ontario, the Conservatives did such a piss poor job of managing the whole thing that basically no one could figure out where to find them or when they were available. Vaccination rates remained some of the lowest in Canada while thousands of vials sat around expiring.

During this epic shit show, the only reliable and useful source of information on where and how you could get vaccinated was a single Twitter account.