Mastodon CEO Eugen Roszko spoke about major moderation changes announced by Meta on Tuesday. This will force social networking giant Meta to ditch fact-checking across its apps and replace it with a crowdsourced community notes feature similar to X’s. The founder of Mastodon, whose app competes with X and Meta’s X rival Instagram Threads, called Meta’s changes “very concerning” and said: “This is a matter of concern to anyone with a conscience.” He also warned Threads users who cross-post from Threads to Mastodon via Threads’ Fediverse sharing feature that Mastodon will take action against Threads accounts that violate hate speech or Mastodon’s existing policies. .
Following the announcement of the relaxation of Meta’s content moderation rules, which will impact the LGBTQ community and other marginalized users, many Mastodon users are wondering if this is a good time for the open source decentralized social network given its relationship with Threads. I wanted to know what it meant.
Last June, Meta rolled out the Fediverse sharing feature to all Threads users after beta testing in the US, Canada, and Japan. This feature allows Threads users to enable the option to publish their posts directly to Mastodon, allowing them to reach a wider audience.
Rochko previously touted the Threads coalition, saying the move made open source Mastodon a “much more attractive option.” He also talks about how Meta’s adoption of the underlying ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated servers validates the move to decentralized social media.
However, not everyone in the Fediverse universally agrees on the integration of Mastodon and Threads. Hundreds of small Mastodon servers are blocking Threads, so users can’t connect with Threads users and vice versa. (Meta has also blocked hundreds of Mastodon servers for violating community standards and other moderation and privacy issues.)
Until now, it was unclear how Mastodon would respond to Meta’s new policy and whether large Mastodon instances like mastodon.social would take action against Threads accounts.
Rochko’s post shows that the organization recognizes that Threads integration may soon become a moderation challenge. “Hate speech is prohibited and we will take action if we find threaded accounts that violate our policies,” he wrote in a post on his Mastodon account.
He also urged users on the thread who don’t agree with the new direction of the meta to move to Mastodon instead, but that’s not as easy as moving accounts between different Mastodon servers. This is because Threads is not yet fully integrated with the Fediverse in this way.
