You don’t have to follow politics quite as closely as I do to know that yesterday was kind of a big deal over in the UK. If somehow you missed it – there was a general election, the ruling Conservative (tory) party lost, and there was a swift and historic transition of power to Sir Kier Starmer and his Labour Party. This was pretty exciting for me, as I’d posted just over a week ago essentially saying this is what I was hoping for.
Being the cool type of person that I am, naturally I planned on staying up unreasonably late to watch the excellent live coverage from the BBC and to post incessantly on threads throughout the evening. I started the night by posting individual seat results as they came in for the benefit of those who, like me, are perhaps living overseas and might not be having an easy time keeping up with the results.
All was well for the first couple of hours. I was eating an unreasonable amount of snacks. The tory party were losing a thoroughly satisfying amount of seats. My posts were being sent in rapid fire succession. Until they weren’t. You see, I quickly ran in to some kind of invisible road block, where attempting to post was giving me a “failed to upload post” error. There was no indication that I’d run afoul of some kind of rule or policy. Just a generic error. Huh.
Playing around for a few minutes, it seemed to me that removing the hashtag I’d been using (#UK Election) allowed me to post again. Weird right? So I went ahead and continued posting, now without the hashtag. All was well for another 10 posts or so, before I ran into the same issue. “Failed to upload post” said the prompt, again and again. This time, no amount of tweaking my post made a difference. It’s been a day, and I still can’t post even the word “test”. Worse still, seeing as Threads and Instagram share a user database, I also seem to have some issues where I can now upload new photos on Instagram, but only without captions.
My assumption is that what happened is that Threads have some content moderation bots running in the background constantly seeking out spam. My frequent posting in a manner that would have possibly seemed “artificial” may have triggered some kind of rate-limiting on the platform. This however, is a little problematic for a couple of reasons.
First – in an interview with Platformer, Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram and Threads) recently said that Threads is “a place for commentary about what’s happening in the world“. Neat, except it turns out that if you choose to use the platform for commentary about what’s happening… you can’t, because you’ll run into the same issue that I was having last night. When big events happen, people typically turn to Twitter (X) to post their thoughts, news, updates – whatever. Many an event has broken over on that platform and it was in part due to the fact that you could just post your entire stream of consciousness on there with little hinderance or delay. Back when I was younger, I actually ran a political blog and we essentially did just that – live posting the results of local elections from time to time, along with the London Riots of 2011.
If Mosseri is serious about taking marketshare from X, then he needs to create a platform where commentary isn’t just encouraged, but where the system allows it to happen. As triggering to a moderation system as my posts must have been – they were ultimately written by a real-life human, each unique in their actual content, and posted with the best of intentions.
Secondly, and most annoyingly – the Threads/Instagram app (and website) seems to deny there being any restriction on my account at all. I still can’t post (other than as a reply to other users) and I’m still just getting generic “post failed” messaging with no specific messaging attached. I haven’t had any message or popup telling me I’m banned temporarily or permanently. I haven’t had an email from anyone. Heck, even visiting the Threads “account status” page provides no clarification – bizarrely claiming that there are no restrictions on my account despite all the evidence to the contrary.
So, do I still love Threads? Yes. Can I seriously recommend it as an actual communication tool for real life, live events? No, and given that they’ve had a year to get this right, that’s pretty disappointing. Luckily, there’s the Canadian General Election to look forward to in the next year or so – hopefully my threads account is re-enabled by then. If and when Meta does decide to lift my soft ban, you can follow me over on Threads @postsbychris
