Threads & Project 2025

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I’ve written here and there about Threads. I’ve written about how I believe it’s a totally viable platform for federated social media users to dip their toes into the ocean of what it means to not be locked to just one platform. I’ve written about Threads suddenly posting some smarmy Harry Potter reference post, regardless of what this means for the transgender users of the platform, and the hate that’s routinely spewed from the author of the series.

And now, today, it is with great displeasure, I have to write about Dustin Carmack, director of public policy behind Meta, and by extension, Threads, and his association with Project 2025. No, I’m not talking about the totally cool and awesome dude who made Doom, John Carmack

If you didn’t know, Project 2025 is a crackpot fascist group of schemers who seek to seize control of the country, and then subsequently drag us back to 1952.

As The New Republic notes, Project 2025 is “a remarkably detailed guide to turning the United States into a fascist’s paradise.” The primary document of Project 2025, the magazine explains, lays out what is essentially a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist.”

This brings us to Dustin, the man who wrote the section of these guidelines on the intelligence community.

The basis of this chapter is mostly establishing who the enemies of the United States are, be it Europe, China, or North Korea, then stiffening security, and heightening penalties. It’s an aggressive push for revenge against these key countries, and, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not interested in World War 3.

That all aside, this is one small part of a larger agenda that is designed to swing us back to the fifties, and strip most people of their fundamental, inalienable rights. To erase those who are different, who experience their lives different than that of what they view to be the “average American.” And I believe this has already started, as Elon Musk seized control of Twitter on October 28th, 2022, and now Meta with their new public policy director, Dustin Carmack.

This could be even worse than Musk’s seizure of Twitter, because Meta doesn’t just own Threads. Meta owns Facebook (already a hot-bed of misinformation and rage-baiting), Whatsapp, and Instagram, too.

I believe this is a concerted effort to control not just what you share on corporate social media, but how you exist, online. An effort to swing public opinion, and manipulate it, any way they want, using the greatest forces of information in the 21st century: Social media.

Dustin has worked for the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign, the Heritage Foundation, and the office of the Director of National Intelligence. To hire someone like this to lead public policy on your budding platform, among others that have existed for years, spells … something terrible.

I remember it like it was just yesterday, when Adam Mosseri called Threads a place that was to be “friendly, and open.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

How far we’ve fallen from our vision in only a year, after establishing a platform that was thought to be a viable alternative for regular people to gather away from the engagement-bait hell that Twitter has become.

Now is the best time for you to explore real alternatives, if even you’re still interested in maintaining a presence on social media. Read my post on getting started on Mastodon, and my informational piece on the ActivityPub network, and give leaving corporate social media some real thought. Your digital identity, and maybe even your safety, in the future, might depend on it.

Some other things Project 2025 seeks to do:

• Gut climate change protections
• Crack down on legal immigration
• Restrict reproductive care, even further
• Gut the education department (it’s harder to control people when they’re educated)
• End subsidies on stem cell research
• Continue and finish construction on the border wall
• Eliminate the LGBTQ+ community from mention in all forms of education
• Turn the FBI into an enforcement-arm of the White House, rather than an independent agency
• Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination
• Take the corporate income tax down to 18%
• End prescription drug price caps
• Force remote-workers to work 10 hour, rather than 8 hour days
• Roll back overtime protections in the workplace
• End the Student loan forgiveness program
• Gut medicaid
• Increase taxes on middle-class families, at the very least (because we all know there is more than just a middle-class)

And this is all of what I could glean from viewing numerous websites who all seem to only list a few of the facts, rather than all of them. But I’m sure there’s more …

You had an okay run Threads, but it seems your time is up.