‘It Ain’t Great, Folks’: Mehdi Hasan Laments Having To Choose Between Twitter and Threads Apps Run By Billionaires With Dubious Track Records

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan lamented that he’s having trouble choosing between the lesser of two social media evils, now that Mark Zuckerberg has launched Twitter competitor, Threads.

“I’m under no illusion that I am trying to jump ship from a site run by a billionaire who has amplified white supremacists, & anti vaxxers to a new site run by a billionaire whose other site has been accused of amplifying literal genocides. It ain’t great, folks. I know that,” Hasan tweeted.

Meta CEO Zuckerberg posted Friday that his new text-based social media site had “70 million sign ups on Threads as of this morning. Way beyond our expectations.” The platform has its work cut out for it, however, to catch up to Twitter’s 400 million registered users.

Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, promising to be a “free speech absolutist,” but some media outlets have accused Musk of creating a platform for hate speech. According to Vice:

In recent days, the platform’s new CEO has reactivated the accounts of known neo-Nazis; shared a picture of a white supremacist who said he’d like Trump to be more like Hitler; failed to prevent users from posting videos of the Christchurch massacre; tweeted a popular alt-right meme; used a known antisemitic trope; and, inadvertently or not, shared a dogwhistle that white supremacists interpreted as praise for Hitler.

Hasan declared, “Hypocrisy, Elon Musk be thy name,” on his show in May, saying Musk “cravenly” caved to “the demands of foreign autocracies.”

Zuckerberg came under fire in 2018 when Facebook was accused of fomenting a genocide in Myanmar. The New York Times reported:

Members of the Myanmar military were the prime operatives behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that stretched back half a decade and that targeted the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, the people said. The military exploited Facebook’s wide reach in Myanmar, where it is so broadly used that many of the country’s 18 million internet users confuse the Silicon Valley social media platform with the internet. Human rights groups blame the anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history.

In a 2019 article in The Intercept, Hasan accused Facebook of being “An engine of anti-Muslim hate the world over.”

The Twitter vs. Threads debate has now entered the legal arena: on Thursday, Musk threatened to sue Meta for stealing Twitter’s “trade secrets.”

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