Twitter’s policy on misinformation related to Covid-19 is no more, as the company quietly updated a nearly two-year-old blog post with a terse, one-sentence statement and no explanation for the move.
The social network said atop its updated blog post, “Effective Nov. 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy.”
Twitter could not be reached for comment, as the company apparently eliminated its media relations department as part of its mass layoffs earlier this month.
Since the company’s internal and contract content moderation teams were gutted, as well, the policy change may have been implemented due to a lack of manpower to enforce the previously existing policy.
Twitter said when it implemented its initial policy in 2020, “We will continue to remove demonstrably false or potentially misleading content that has the highest risk of causing harm.”
Now, the result will likely be more content like this tweet from Kim Dotcom—an internet entrepreneur facing criminal copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud charges from the U.S. Department of Justice—shared by Natasha Lomas of TechCrunch, who pointed out that Dotcom based his claims that “vaccines now kill more people than Covid” on a graph of “excess deaths” in Europe from “European mortality monitoring activity” EuroMOMO, which does not reference any causes of those excess deaths.
