Surprise They have to be allowed to spread lies unencumbered or they are being persecuted: In the days since Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads app premiered, a number of rather predictable media storylines and narratives have dominated the news cycles around the latest would-be Twitter replacement. One focuses on the sheer power of Zuckerberg’s Meta empire—Threads is now the fastest-growing app in history. Zuckerberg says his new platform hit 100 million sign-ups in less than a week. Of course, many of those users were already on other Zuckerberg digital properties: Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. A related narrative argues that this early but apparent success is a much-needed win for Zuckerberg, who squandered billions trying to convince people to join his online cartoon world, the metaverse. There’s also a more esoteric storyline about how the success of Threads might affect Zuckerberg’s looming antitrust battles. And yet somehow, the most predictable narrative is the right’s immediate cries that Threads is censoring their “free speech.” This argument unfolded along exhaustingly familiar lines with right-wing figures regurgitating the same clichés and grievances they invoke every time a social media platform doesn’t cater to their ideological whims. On the day after Threads went live, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that “Threads will be the same Marxist style social media experience that Zuckerberg usually offers.” Less than a week after the app launched, one Fox News guest declared that the supposed censorship on Threads is “absolutely straight out of Orwell’s 1984.” The most cited example of this supposed censorship—and the one MTG referenced in her tweet—was a…