Twitter discontinues Covid misinformation policy under Elon Musk
Musk is also said to have reduced the size of the team responsible for stopping child sexual exploitation on the platform
Twitter is no longer enforcing a policy to remove misleading or inaccurate material on Covid-19.
"Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy," read a message posted at a Twitter transparency web page.
By abandoning this policy, the platform will no longer label posts that contain untrue information about the disease or offer additional corrective information as it previously did.
Twitter said in December 2020 that it would begin to flag and delete disinformation concerning Covid-19 vaccinations. The decision was taken in response to the hundreds of accounts that made misleading claims about the coronavirus and the negative effects of immunisations. Prohibited information included claims about bogus treatments or posts which refuted scientific facts, as well as statements meant to encourage others to disregard health authority guidelines.
Users who continued to spread this kind of false information were banned from the platform and Twitter said it had suspended 11,230 accounts for violating the rules as of September of this year.
Elon Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, has been vocal in his criticism of how health officials have responded to the coronavirus pandemic.
During Tesla's first quarter 2020 earnings call, Elon Musk said that the stay-at-home orders were forcibly imprisoning people in their houses against their constitutional rights. The same year, he claimed that the mortality rate of Covid-19 was significantly lower than what authorities had predicted.
Free speech absolutism
Under Musk, who describes himself a "free speech absolutist," Twitter has started reinstating over 62,000 accounts, according to Platformer news blog, an example of which is the account belonging to Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who has used the platform to tweet multiple baseless and often demonstrably untrue claims about everything from Covid to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol building.
Musk believes that all legally permissible content should be allowed on Twitter. On Monday, he said that his actions were part of a "revolution against online censorship in America."
An alternative explanation could be that Twitter no longer has the staff to enforce these policies. Around half of Twitter's staff have been let go since Musk took control of the company last month. Part of this has involved drastically reducing the size of the team charged with stopping child sexual exploitation on the platform, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Less than ten experts remain on the team to examine complaints of child sexual exploitation. About 20 experts were part of the team at the start of the year. Before it was reduced in size, the team, which included a mix of former law enforcement officials and child safety specialists based in the US, Singapore, and Ireland, was overworked and had been putting in long hours to address user complaints and legal requirements, according to the sources. They were responsible for preventing the dissemination of materials including child sexual abuse and incidents of online grooming.
Carolina Christofoletti, a CSAM researcher from the University of So Paulo in Brazil, told Wired that the impact of layoffs and resignations on Twitter's ability to stop CSAM is "very worrying".
"It's delusional to think that there will be no impact on the platform if people who were working on child safety inside of Twitter can be laid off or allowed to resign," she said.
Last week, Musk said that "removing child exploitation is priority #1" and urged users to respond in the comments if they spot anything that Twitter needs to address.
"This question should not be a Twitter thread," Christofoletti said.
"That's the very question that he should be asking to the child safety team that he laid off. That's the contradiction here."