‘Let’s all go back to MySpace’: Threads, Twitter, Truth Social. The last thing the world needs is another social-media platform.

Psychologists and social-media analysts are skeptical — not so much about Threads potential success and the buzz it’s already created, but about how another social-media platform will impact the mental health, political discourse, the spread of misinformation and amplification of racism and hate speech, something Zuckerberg has endeavored to address. Privacy experts also worry about the information Threads can collect from your phone — your location, browsing and purchase history, and even health information.

Dr. Don Grant, national adviser for healthy device management for Newport Healthcare, who has worked on the relationship between people and their devices for 14 years, understands that social media brings people together, but looking at the proliferation of fake news and political spats on Twitter, he is not unaware that it increasingly tears them apart. Studies have linked social media to body dysmorphia among young people, and depression. They, and we, compare and despair. Social media and smartphone apps have also been shown to be addictive. 

His first thought when he read about Threads was: “Why? Let’s all go back to MySpace. What was wrong with MySpace? MySpace was fun. MySpace was friendly. And Classmates.com. I found some friends from high school. I don’t know whether we need any of it.” He worries that young people are the “virtual canaries” in the social-media coal mines. “It’s unvetted. Anyone can go on social-media platforms,” he told MarketWatch. “This juggernaut has become the most influential thing that exists for man. Anyone can put anything out there.”

Also see: Social media offer us two choices: Orwell’s hell, or Huxley’s

Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology at the department of psychology in the University of Cambridge, and author of “Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity,” sees more fragmentation with the launch of yet another forum to add to Twitter, and Truth Social — the conservative platform created by Trump Media & Technology Group, which reportedly only has a couple of million of active monthly users. On the one hand, more sites leads to more echo chambers. On the other, dominance by one tech giant is far from ideal.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing that there are so many social media sites,” he told MarketWatch. “The echo chambers erode conversations and discourse. But we don’t want one company to dominate the market. When people splinter off into their own echo chambers, some of these effects intensify. People who don’t agree with the mainstream social media and blame censorship get more extreme in these echo chambers — reverberating their own information without any quality control.” (Meta, Twitter and Truth Social did not respond to requests for comment.)

Grant agrees. “Do we need any of it? The idea of competition, and checks and balances is great,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We’ve seen so many come and go. But I don’t like monopolies. This is just one more piece for Meta’s ‘fediverse’ — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and now Threads. That’s a lot of control over a lot of people over a lot of platforms.” Facebook alone has nearly 3 billion monthly users. Meta’s “fediverse,” in theory, connects and shares information among platforms.

Van der Linden has advised Meta on how to counter disinformation, but he is not confident that the same toxicity won’t rear its head on Threads, just like it has on other social-media platforms. “I’m quite skeptical that the incentives are not going to be driven by ad revenue, polarization and outrage,” he said. “Until we have clear evidence that Meta has radically changed its business model, I think we’re just going to have another social-media platform — another that we’re going to worry about in terms of potentially spreading misinformation, and how to debunk it.”

Related: This ‘Thread’ social platform existed years before Meta’s new app — and it could sue, experts say 

Dr. Emma Svanberg, a clinical psychologist working in London and author of “Parenting for Humans,” said people were excited about Threads, hence the high level of early sign-ups. “The simplicity of Threads seemed to appeal to our essential need for community,” she told MarketWatch. Svanberg sees this as a positive sign that people are seeking out warmer climes for sharing information. “While we talk a lot about the downsides of social media, there is also evidence to show that it can have benefits, including connection to others, education and activism,” she added. 

But many psychologists, economists and activists also say the problems — political, social and psychological — should be addressed by people who use these platforms, government regulation and the social-media companies themselves. The American Psychological Association has a range of suggestions for tackling the detrimental effects of social media, including establishing social-media guardrails — limiting the time spent on your phone, turning off notifications for all your apps, not bringing your phone to the dinner table, restaurant or, indeed, to bed.

On the apps themselves, individual accounts could get credibility scores based on a mix of different signals related to the quality of their output, van der Linden said. “Install reputational incentives so people don’t put out total nonsense, and have more user-driven input. A ‘click’ assumes you want more of something, but people are engaging with content they don’t want. Instead, ask people what kind of content they want.” He also favors “preemptive resilience,” where platforms forewarn users about misleading content related to politics or climate change.

Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has suggested the government impose a levy to tax advertising revenue from social-media companies like Meta and search engines like Google
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so they change their business models where customers essentially become the product and trade their information for free services. Grant said such money could and should be used for media-literacy programs. “They need to start early,” he said, “especially for the kids, so they understand the difference between misinformation and know about cyber aggression.”

Threads, meanwhile, is caught up in a social-media fight of its own, with Musk accusing Meta of misappropriating Twitter’s “trade secrets.” That aspect of the launch, at least, could not be described as “friendly.”