The latest issue of the saga we’re all tired of hearing about: Twitter, under Elon Musk, has stopped enforcing its policy on misleading COVID-19 information.
“Effective Nov. 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” Twitter posted on its misinformation policy page. The page was updated without public notice, though Twitter users started commenting on the change on Monday, five days after the policy change.
The first crawl from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine that reflects the update is on Nov. 29. The next earlier snapshot, from Nov. 11, shows the policy still in place.
From the beginning of 2020 until now, Twitter has suspended over 11,000 accounts for breaking the COVID-19 misleading information policy and — in the wake of Musk’s decision to reinstate the accounts of people such as far-right U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kanye West and former President Donald Trump — there has been speculation Twitter will restore all of them.
“Cancel culture needs to be canceled!!” Musk tweeted and briefly pinned to the top of his profile Wednesday in an apparent response to the public reaction to the news.
“The other platforms are going to be keeping a close eye on Twitter and seeing essentially if they can get away with it because if they can, they can save themselves a lot of money and resources and time by following a similar model and still look good in a rolled back version,” Jenna Sherman, a program manager at Meedan — a health information nonprofit — said in a CNN interview.
The European Commission warned Musk of a Twitter ban yesterday unless it abides by “strict content moderation rules,” according to the Financial Times.
“EU officials have expressed concerns over whether Twitter has enough staff to comply with the new rules after Musk fired more than half of its 7,500 workforce this month,” according to FT reporter Javier Espinoza.
Twitter responded in a blog post that, “None of our policies have changed. Our approach to policy enforcement will rely more heavily on de-amplification of violative content: freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
In its post, Twitter also affirmed commitments against not allowing hateful conduct, abuse or any content that otherwise violates its rules.
“What has changed is our approach to experimentation,” Twitter wrote. “As you’ve seen over the past several weeks, Twitter is embracing public testing. We believe that this open and transparent approach to innovation is healthy, as it enables us to move faster and gather user feedback in real-time.”
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