Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday
night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter's online
rules: "Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the
COVID-19 misleading information policy.”
By Tuesday, some Twitter accounts were
testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform's hands-off approach,
which comes after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk.
“This policy was used to silence people
across the world who questioned the media narrative surrounding the virus and
treatment options,” tweeted Dr. Simone Gold, a physician and leading purveyor
of COVID-19 misinformation. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!”
Twitter's decision to no longer remove
false claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines disappointed public health
officials, however, who said it could lead to more false claims about the
virus, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
“Bad news,” tweeted epidemiologist Eric
Feigl-Ding, who urged people not to flee Twitter but to keep up the fight
against bad information about the virus. “Stay folks — do NOT cede the town
square to them!”
While Twitter's efforts to stop false
claims about COVID weren't perfect, the company's decision to reverse course is
an abdication of its duty to its users, said Paul Russo, a social media
researcher and dean of the Katz School of Science and Health at Yeshiva
University in New York.
Russo added that it's the latest of several
recent moves by Twitter that could ultimately scare away some users and even
advertisers. Some big names in business have already paused their ads on
Twitter over questions about its direction under Musk.
“It is 100% the responsibility of the
platform to protect its users from harmful content,” Russo said. “This is
absolutely unacceptable.”
The virus, meanwhile, continues to spread.
Nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday,
according to data from Johns Hopkins University — far lower than last winter
but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,100
people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the
most recent federal daily averages.
Cases and deaths were up from two weeks
earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, most
Americans haven’t gotten the latest boosters, and many have stopped wearing
masks.
Musk, who has himself spread COVID
misinformation on Twitter, has signaled an interest in rolling back many of the
platform's previous rules meant to combat misinformation.
Last week, Musk said he would grant
“amnesty” to account holders who had been kicked off Twitter. He's also
reinstated the accounts for several people who spread COVID misinformation,
including that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal account was suspended
this year for repeatedly violating Twitter's COVID rules.
Greene's most recent tweets include ones
questioning the effectiveness of masks and making baseless claims about the
safety of COVID vaccines.
Since the pandemic began, platforms like
Twitter and Facebook have struggled to respond to a torrent of misinformation
about the virus, its origins and the response to it.
Under the policy enacted in January 2020,
Twitter prohibited false claims about COVID-19 that the platform determined
could lead to real-world harms. More than 11,000 accounts were suspended for
violating the rules, and nearly 100,000 pieces of content were removed from the
platform, according to Twitter's latest numbers.
Despite its rules prohibiting COVID
misinformation, Twitter has struggled with enforcement. Posts making bogus
claims about home remedies or vaccines could still be found, and it was
difficult on Tuesday to identify exactly how the platform's rules may have
changed.
Messages left with San Francisco-based
Twitter seeking more information about its policy on COVID-19 misinformation
were not immediately returned Tuesday.
A search for common terms associated with
COVID misinformation on Tuesday yielded lots of misleading content, but also
automatic links to helpful resources about the virus as well as authoritative
sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19
coordinator, said Tuesday that the problem of COVID-19 misinformation is far
larger than one platform, and that policies prohibiting COVID misinformation
weren't the best solution anyway.
Speaking at a Knight Foundation forum
Tuesday, Jha said misinformation about the virus spread for a number of
reasons, including legitimate uncertainty about a deadly illness. Simply
prohibiting certain kinds of content isn't going to help people find good
information, or make them feel more confident about what they're hearing from
their medical providers, he said.
“I think we all have a collective
responsibility,” Jha said of combating misinformation about COVID. “The
consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is
literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily.”