Can’t get that in the EU.
Under EU data privacy rules, it faces higher hurdles than in the US or UK, where it has launched.
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Well that sure showed them
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Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads
Right-wing figures and extremists are testing Meta’s content moderation policies and posting slurs and other forms of hate speech on Meta’s Twitter alternative
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Nothing like having all the bad actors self-organize onto one platform. It sure will make a lot of law enforcement jobs easier.
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Is it just time to burn the whole social media thing to the ground?
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I think (I hope) that we are starting to see the appeal of universal, commercial, (indirectly) state sponsored platforms diminish.
I have no current information on how much state financing is still going to these platforms, directly or indirectly. I suspect that they are slowly being cut loose by the three-letter agencies as the urgency of the War on Terror diminishes, people (especially “of interest”) get smarter about tracking, and their role as a monitoring tool is replaced by direct, back-door access to mobile devices (which has also, IMHO, backfired as less benevolent states figure/configure their ways in through those doors).
The big platforms’ ineffectiveness to shape advertising is becoming more well known. I think people are gaining the socio-/technical- skills to re-organize, especially as the operation of the alternatives gets easier, more fluid, and the technology cost is dropping. Moderation burden will always be there, I think. As Reddit and Twitter have been so kind to demonstrate of late, without government support (and I include the support of cheap capital), their business case is not a particularly strong one.
I’m hopeful.
(/me checks colour of the helicopter flying by… 
Orange? whew…)
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I’d be up to drawing memes by hand and mail them, but…
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I don’t see them as state sponsored, however much they get in tax breaks, and other public funding. I’d argue it needs to have some compelling interest for the public to qualify, and lately I’m struggling to see any value to the public on the social media as it currently stands. And yes, I’m aware that this is built on publicly funded architecture, etc… I know that history a bit. But it’s like much else since the 70s, where public funding/support goes to support corporate profitability. They’ve socialized the production and privatized the profits. That’s directly against public interest. That’s the state support the whims of private corporation - hardly in the public interests. We’d be much better off with some sort of actual public option for social media…
Start a zine! it’s good enough for punks in the 80s, and 90s, it’s good enough for us today!
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Been there, never got a t-shirt.
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Shouldn’t you have made your own? 
Isn’t that the punk rock way?
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Pretty sure I still have unsent, chain-letter mail art down in the archives…
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Hold on. How does Meta know that a VPN connection is ultimately coming from the EU?
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From what I read when thinking of doing this for work was that they can have a list of nodes? associated with different vpn providers.
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They can block known VPN exit nodes, but how do they know where the other end of the connection is? That’s the whole point of using a VPN with world-wide nodes to get around geo restrictions.
Are they shutting down all VPN access or did they breach the VPN’s privacy protection?
What if someone uses TOR?
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10 to 1, the people using the VPN have EU as their place of residence in Insta?
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That, or Meta has gathered enough other data to have a solid fix on the user’s home location.
They’re probably simply blocking known EU residents without worrying about their IP address: direct, VPN or on a US trip, they’re blocked.
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Yeah, it’s not like Meta has zero location data on the average user…
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