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@gourd @aral I have seen that take but I don't necessarily see hard evidence that's the case. One notable bit that doesn't line up is that they *are* launching in the UK, where theoretically the GDPR got folded into national laws. If they're unable to launch in the EU but are able to in the UK, that would then under this theory have to rely on some divergence in the UK fork of the GDPR. Maybe there is one, I can't say I know, but I haven't seen anyone propose what that might be.

@aral @gourd Look, I'm all for being cynical about megacorporations and the government regulators they've captured, but this is all a lot of specific conjecturing being done based on very few details that are all entirely indirect. Facebook hasn't even officially announced the launch date, everyone's just going off of app store metadata!

@gourd @aral Absolutely not asking to give them the benefit of the doubt, just trying not to help spread random speculation. As you're pointing out, plenty of other reasons to dislike the company without making up new ones (which, among other things, runs the risk of leading unconvinced folks to disbelieve other and future complaints about such companies). IMHO we should stick to our strongest, most solid arguments.

And I dunno, if we want this place to be better than for-profit social networks like Facebook and Twitter then maybe having better habits—like not breathlessly reposting single-sourced articles and unsubstantiated guessing atop of them as if it's all proven factual—is one of the ways we get there?

@skua @aral @gourd The minimization is an artifact of your misreading of my comment. And my deliberate understatement was to dryly emphasize that such reasons are far firmer in their substantiation and more worth pointing to than mere speculation that Threads might not be GDPR compliant.

And after all, the examples of Meta's deeply negative impact on the world being pointed to are through products/services of theirs that operate in the EU as it is—and especially in the cases of Facebook's services facilitating the organization and enthusiasm of mass violence, the problems are more systemic than merely siloing data.

(As a side note, I'm slowly coming around to calling them Meta, if only because it's helpful to remember that Facebook alone isn't their only problematic product — IIRC a lot of their genocide facilitation has come through WhatsApp.)