Experts in public well being praised Twitter’s efforts to tamp down on covid misinformation. In a 2021 advisory report to expertise platforms, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy cited Twitter’s coverage for example of how tech corporations ought to go about combating misinformation.
“Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health,” Murthy wrote. “It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”
However, Twitter has additionally struggled to police misinformation precisely and lately started labeling some factual information about covid as misinformation and banning scientists and researchers who tried to warn the general public of the long-term hurt of covid on the physique. As of final weekend, many tweets selling anti-vaccine content material and covid misinformation remained on the platform.
“That is a real danger of setting yourself up with the task of deciding what is true and what is false,” Emily Dreyfuss, co-author of “Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America,” mentioned of Twitter’s fumbles surrounding covid misinformation.
But she mentioned that was all of the extra purpose to enhance the method and insurance policies, not scrap them altogether.
“During the pandemic, social media companies finally realized misinformation is a life-or-death issue because medical misinformation about covid had such dire consequences it could not be ignored,” she mentioned. “Musk getting rid of these policies is backtracking on years and years of painfully won lessons on how to make the internet safe and not harmful.”
“I’m doing internal medicine, and I see a lot of patients in primary care clinic,” mentioned Max Jordan Nguemeni, a resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “A lot of what I do when I offer vaccines is combating disinformation. The spread of misinformation online on platforms people rely on for news, like Twitter, worries me, especially when I think about my patients who are more vulnerable, older or not English-speaking.”
Jon Shaffer, a well being sociologist and postdoctoral fellow on the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, mentioned he apprehensive that, when mixed with Musk’s plan to permit Twitter customers to buy a blue verified examine mark for $8 a month, the abandonment of the misinformation coverage will likely be particularly harmful.
“People with the purchased blue check marks will certainly sell snake oil and promote baseless ideas for their own personal and political profit, and the result will be that poor people will continue to die from covid,” Shaffer mentioned.
Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, mentioned scrapping the covid misinformation coverage will contribute to public confusion.
“We’re going through an infodemic alongside a pandemic,” Tran mentioned. “What that means is people are exposed to so much information that they don’t know what’s true or what’s not. They don’t know what to do to protect their health and the health of people around them. This change by Musk is going to make that problem even worse.”
The transfer comes as Musk seems to be shifting extra of the accountability to policing misinformation to customers via the corporate’s Birdwatch program, which permits Twitter customers to price and add corrections to tweets. Lately, nevertheless, as Birdwatch has scaled to extra customers, incorrect information about covid has been added to tweets just because a mass of customers upvoted it. This is harmful, Dreyfuss mentioned.
“Musk is scrapping a misinformation policy that was imperfect and replacing it with a new system that’s much more easily hacked and gamed,” she mentioned. “What he’s doing with this policy is washing his hands of Twitter’s responsibility of determining fact or fiction and giving it over to the users of Twitter, which we know is not going to be an effective strategy at all. They will make true whatever they want to make true.”
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of belief and security, mentioned Musk’s resolution to cease policing covid misinformation was “bad and damaging” and possibly not “tenable going forward.” “You simply cannot do that if you are operating what you want to be a commercially viable consumer service,” he mentioned.
Musk himself has unfold covid misinformation. In 2020, he claimed that coronavirus circumstances could be “close to zero” by April 2020. He also told SpaceX employees in March 2020, because the world was simply starting to close down through the pandemic, that they have been extra more likely to die in a automotive crash than of covid. That June, he reopened the Tesla plant in Fremont, Calif., in opposition to county well being and security orders however promised staff they may keep residence in the event that they felt unwell and wouldn’t be penalized. Employees with covid who did keep residence, nevertheless, have been promptly fired.
Musk additionally known as virus-related restrictions “fascist” on a 2020 Tesla earnings name. During a podcast look in September 2020, Musk mentioned he would not get vaccinated and downplayed the virus’s loss of life toll. “Everybody dies,” he mentioned.
But specialists say Musk’s resolution will result in extra deaths. “It’s a huge step backwards in a pandemic that has killed a million Americans and millions more worldwide,” Shaffer mentioned. “It’s certain to get many more people killed from covid than otherwise would.”