Twitter drops COVID-19 misinformation policy
Twitter has quietly announced that the platform is no longer enforcing its COVID-19 misleading information policy, a tool introduced during the pandemic to help people find reliable information.
Since January 2020, 11.7 million accounts have been « challenged » under the policy, which likely means they received a warning that their tweet was misleading or inaccurate; while 11,230 accounts were suspended and 97,674 content deleted, according to Twitter.
« The world has changed dramatically since this pandemic was first declared a public health emergency, » reads a section of Twitter’s « transparency » website. “Since then, public health experts, medical professionals, scientists and researchers have been educating and informing us about how to stay safe, and Twitter has worked to highlight and strengthen this public conversation. vital. »
Under this policy, Twitter required users to delete tweets containing statements intended to influence others to violate global or local health authority COVID guidelines, misleading information about unfounded treatments for the virus, and false or misleading information. diagnostics, among others.
According to Twitter, the policy has not been in effect since November 23.
This isn’t the first change to the platform since Elon Musk took ownership, including gutting the teams primarily responsible for keeping the platform free of misinformation and the curatorial teamwhich was « responsible for highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories happening on Twitter ».
More soon …
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