Twitter quietly drops Covid misinformation prevention policy under Elon Musk

Twitter has quietly ended the enforcement of its policy to stop the spread of Covid misinformation. The social media giant introduced the policy during the pandemic and used it to remove thousands of misleading tweets as part of efforts to stop the spread of “potentially harmful and misleading information” about the virus and vaccines.

Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended over 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules, removing almost 100,000 pieces of content that breached those standards, according to internal statistics.

However, a note added to the company’s webpage detailing the policy’s work says that “effective November 23 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy”. The company did not publicly announce the change.

The move is likely to raise new concerns about Elon Musk’s approach to content moderation at the company since his takeover last month.

Musk has said he believes in “absolute free speech” and wants to reduce content moderation on the site— something critics warned would lead to a spike in abuse, harassment, and other harmful behaviour.

In May 2020, as the pandemic was deepening, the Tesla CEO emerged as a champion of defying lockdown orders intended to stop the coronavirus from spreading in the US.

In one instance, Tesla’s factory reopened— with Musk practically daring local authorities to arrest him.

Since taking over the company in October, the billionaire has laid off more than half of the platform’s 7,500 staff, which has increased fears about the firm’s ability to successfully moderate the site with substantially reduced staff numbers.

Earlier this month, the billionaire restored former US president Donald Trump’s Twitter account and has also allowed Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, to return after he was suspended for antisemitic comments.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Musk has also dramatically reduced the size of the team devoted to tackling child sexual exploitation on the platform. The report suggests that the team of specialists that review and escalate reports of child sexual exploitation has more been halved. Last week, the SpaceX CEO tweeted that “removing child exploitation is priority #1”. The changes are the latest incidents in Musk’s turbulent reign as Twitter boss. On Monday, he accused Apple of threatening to remove the platform from its app store and claimed the iPhone maker had halted most of its advertising on Twitter.

He criticised the tech giant over its commission on purchases made through Apple’s App Store, and posted a meme suggesting he was willing to “go to war” over the issue. A number of companies have paused advertising on Twitter amid concerns about Musk’s content moderation plans. The new Twitter boss has already begun looking for ways to diversify the site's revenue, which is currently almost entirely dependent on advertising. He is hoping to change this by charging a monthly subscription fee for verified status on the platform through the Twitter Blue service.

This was initially launched earlier this month before being paused after a number of incidents of Twitter users paying for verification and then posing as public figures.

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