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Twitter said it has stopped implementing a policy aimed at preventing the spread of Covid misinformation, as its new owner Elon Musk – who previously clashed with US officials over safety rules against the pandemic – continues to rewrite content moderation policies.
The move comes after the mercurial billionaire restored a large number of accounts on the social media network that he previously had It is prohibited for violating the content rulesLike the previous president Donald Trump.
“As of November 23, 2022, Twitter will no longer enforce its Covid-19 misinformation policy,” read a message posted on Twitter’s transparency webpage.
During the pandemic, Twitter has resorted to labeling misleading tweets about Covid and booting users who have continued to spread such misinformation.
The banned content included statements intended to influence people to violate the health authority’s guidelines, along with bogus cures or denials of scientific facts, according to the Twitter blog.
The blog stated that as of September this year, Twitter had suspended 11,230 accounts under the policy.
Musk, who also runs Tesla, clashed with officials in 2020 over pandemic safety orders that temporarily shut down the electric car giant’s California factory, calling the shelter-in-place orders “fascist” and an “outrage” that infringed on personal freedom.
Under Musk, who calls himself the “absolute freedom of speech,” Twitter has begun to bring back nearly 62,000 accounts in what is referred to internally as the “big bang,” according to Curriculum News blog.
Since taking over the platform last month, Musk has cut nearly half of Twitter’s workforce, including several employees tasked with combating disinformation, while an unknown number of employees have resigned voluntarily.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety who left after Musk took over, said during an interview Tuesday at the Knight Foundation conference that he’s not sure how many employees are left at the company to oversee content.
“I can’t tell you,” Roth said when asked by interviewer Kara Swisher, “because our company directory has been off since the acquisition and it’s been nearly impossible to tell definitively who is left on Twitter.”
“It was such a mess.”
Musk believes all content permitted by law should be allowed on Twitter, calling his actions Monday “a revolution against internet censorship in America.”
Although Musk says Twitter is seeing record high engagement with him at the helm, his approach has baffled the company’s top money-makers — advertisers.
In recent weeks, half of the top 100 Twitter advertisers have announced that they have suspended or “apparently stopped advertising on Twitter,” according to an analysis by the nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters.
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