The White House on Monday launched several official accounts on Threads, the social media platform created by the tech giant Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), which is broadly seen as a rival of X — formerly known as Twitter.
The official White House accounts on Threads include the four principals: President Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff. In addition to its official White House account, the Biden administration also launched a Spanish language account, LaCasaBlanca, on the platform.
The executive branch’s launch on the months-old platform has been in the works for weeks, according to a White House official. The official called the accounts “an additional way we can communicate with the American people about this administration’s historic actions to create 14 million jobs, lower prescription drug costs, and protect freedoms, and more.”
Days before the announcement, the White House publicly condemned X’s owner, Elon Musk, after he appeared to indicate support for an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Musk was replying to a user on X who said a rise in online antisemitism was the fault of Jews for supporting “hordes of minorities” and promoting “hatred against whites.” The user said they have no sympathy for Jews who face hateful comments such as “Hitler was right.”
Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth,” helping to amplify the user’s tweet to his vast online following.
In a subsequent post, Musk went on to criticize the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization that combats antisemitism and extremism, saying it “unjustly attacks the majority of the West” for anti-Jewish hate rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”
The White House called the billionaire’s comments an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.”
Responding to the assertion that he’s antisemitic, Musk later posted that “nothing could be further from the truth.”
On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emphasized that the administration would continue to condemn “hateful” and “dangerous” comments. She would not say whether the White House was considering leaving X over Musk’s comments.
Another White House official told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the decision to join Threads was made independently of activity on any other social media platform.
X filed a lawsuit Monday against the left-leaning nonprofit organization Media Matters and its writer Eric Hananoki, over what it called an “intentionally deceptive report” about antisemitism on the platform. The report identified several major companies whose ads appeared next to pro-Nazi posts on the platform. Several companies have pulled their advertising from X in the aftermath of the report and Musk’s recent posts.
Along with declines in advertising, the number of people actively posting on X has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.
Matt Viser, Amy B Wang, Will Oremus and Naomi Nix contributed to this report.
