Twitter under Elon Musk abandons Covid-19 misinformation policy

The platform is an outlier among social-media companies in giving up policing false and misleading information about Covid-19.

Twitter has stopped enforcing a policy aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platform. Picture: Nicholas Kamm and Brendan Smialowski/AFP

Twitter has stopped enforcing a policy aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platform in the company’s latest move to loosen moderation guidelines on the site.

The social-media company announced the change by placing a notice on its website, saying it was no longer policing Covid-19 misinformation as of November 23.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Twitter’s policy change makes it an outlier among major social-media companies on curbing Covid-19 misinformation. Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta Platforms, have policies for removing false or misleading content related to Covid-19. TikTok, owned by ByteDance, has a similar policy. Snap has outlined its approach to preventing the spread of false information related to Covid-19.

Twitter began policing Covid-19 misinformation in 2020. In a blog post from July 2020, the company said it would remove posts that contained false or misleading claims about Covid-19 that could lead to harm.

“Accounts that break this rule repeatedly may be permanently suspended,” Twitter said in the blog post.

As of September, Twitter has suspended more than 11,200 accounts for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, according to the company. Twitter also said it removed nearly 98,000 pieces of content that violated the Covid-19 misinformation policy.

In the first two weeks after Elon Musk’s takeover, one study found that the accounts of the 25 biggest offenders of spreading healthcare and other misinformation had an estimated 57 per cent increase in likes and retweets from the prior two weeks. The most followed of these, an account operated by a known healthcare hoax purveyor, saw a nearly 2,000 per cent increase in engagement, according to the findings from NewsGuard, a tracker and rater of news sites it says traffic in dubious information.

NewsGuard, which was founded in 2018 by Court TV founder Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, employs a team of reporters to investigate and flag sites that frequently publish fake news.

“People can die if they aren’t given information about the reliability of sources,” Mr Brill said. “Elon Musk should empower users by doing that now so they know who’s feeding them the news.” Mr Musk, who has described himself as a free-speech absolutist, has made changes to Twitter’s content-moderation policies, saying the company should generally intervene only to comply with local laws. Mr Musk said last week he would reinstate suspended accounts, bringing back users that previously had been banned for posting hate speech, inciting violence or engaging in other behaviour that violated its policies.

Twitter also reinstated former President Donald Trump’s account earlier this month. Twitter, under its old ownership, had banned MrTrump’s account, citing the risk of further incitement of violence following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Mr Musk has also said Apple has threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store and criticised the tech giant for what he called censorship. Apple has strict policies regarding user-generated content on apps in the App Store. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Who else has Apple censored?” Mr Musk said in a tweet on Monday.

The Wall Street Journal