Twitter stops policing Covid misinformation under CEO Elon Musk

In a recent update to its website, Twitter said that effective Nov. 23, it isn’t any longer enforcing its Covid-19 misleading information policy.

It means the corporate will not prioritize removing or tagging misleading health information related to Covid-19.

Twitter said in December 2020 that it will begin to label and take away misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines as 1000’s of accounts made false claims in regards to the coronavirus and the hostile impacts of immunizations.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been a vocal critic of how health officials reacted to the coronavirus pandemic. He said in the course of the company’s first-quarter 2020 earnings call that the stay-at-home orders were “forcibly imprisoning people of their homes against all their constitutional rights.” He also said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast in 2020 that the mortality rate of Covid-19 was much lower than health officials estimated.

Musk has committed to free speech on Twitter, which could partially explain why the change was enacted. But online safety experts have contended his approach has led to a rise in hate speech, harassment and misinformation on the platform.

Multiple civil rights groups earlier this month urged advertisers to pause promoting on Twitter after the corporate laid off 1000’s of employees, a move the groups feared would impede the corporate’s ability to moderate hateful and other problematic content.

Musk has claimed that hate speech impressions have decreased since October, though it isn’t entirely clear how Twitter has been measuring these impressions.

The change comes as technology newsletter Platformer says employees are scrambling to revive greater than 62,000 suspended accounts. That figure could include among the greater than 11,000 accounts that were suspended for violating the corporate’s Covid-19 misinformation rules.

On Nov. 23, Musk shared a poll asking users whether Twitter should grant “general amnesty” to suspended accounts, so long as that they had not engaged in “egregious spam” or broken any laws. “Yes” received 72.4% of votes, and “No” received 27.6%.

“The people have spoken,” Musk said in a tweet the following day. “Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”‘

The poll was not scientific or resistant to participation from bots.

Musk used the identical Latin phrase, meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God,” on Nov. 19 to announce that former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account can be reinstated. Under previous ownership, Twitter issued a lifetime ban on Trump’s account after his promotion of the Jan. 6 rebel.

The billionaire, who can also be CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was forced to pause the initial launch of its $8 per thirty days Twitter Blue service after users abused the system by purchasing blue checkmarks to impersonate brands and famous people. He banned some impersonators before he shut the service down, nonetheless, again raising questions on his definition of free speech.

Musk didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.