A month into billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the social media giant has chosen to no longer enforce rules on COVID misinformation on the platform. At the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020, Twitter announced that it would remove posts and accounts that disseminated misinformation on COVID-19 and the efficacy of vaccines produced to fight the disease. The policy resulted in the suspension of over 11,000 accounts on the platform and the deletion of around 100,000 posts. The company’s fight against misinformation even earned it praise from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who said that its COVID policy exemplified how social media platforms should handle attempts at misrepresenting facts about the virus.
The reversal of policy was announced on Twitter’s official COVID page earlier this week and is a further step in Musk’s stated objective to restore accounts that were once banned by the company’s former leadership. While no decision has been made on what accounts will be reinstated, Musk’s own views on COVID and COVID vaccines make it a strong possibility that some of the 11,000 users who were banned under the misinformation policy could be allowed to return to the platform. Throughout the pandemic, Musk himself railed against the government response to the virus, stating on many occasions that he felt that concerns about the disease were exaggerated. Musk has further expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines. In an interview with the New York Times, Musk said that while he supports vaccination, he nonetheless feels that he and his family do not need to be vaccinated against COVID.
Musk’s management style and hands-off attitude have sparked criticism from technology experts, who say that his recent decisions have made Twitter a more dangerous place. Yoel Roth, who once served as Twitter’s site integrity chief, says that he left the company after determining that Musk leads based on gut feeling and not the advice of the site’s team of tech experts. Roth adds that Musk’s early decision to fire most of the site’s content moderation team was a major disaster for Twitter and led to a flood of hate speech on the platform.
Dil Bole Oberoi
