Twitter has posted on their website that "Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy."
Just a month after purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk’s company has ceased enforcing its Covid misinformation policy, according to reports.
The change to Twitter’s Covid misinformation policy came last week and went under the radar until some eagle-eyed users of the social media platform noticed it, CBS News reported.
Twitter posted on their website that "Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy."
That policy was first put in place in May 2020 and labeled tweets about the coronavirus pandemic deemed to be incomplete, misleading or disputed, CBS News reported.
Now, because of the new recent change, public health officials are concerned that misinformation about the virus could spread.
Musk, who has been a vocal critic of how health officials reacted to the coronavirus pandemic, said during Tesla’s first-quarter 2020 earnings call that the stay-at-home orders were “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights,” according to NBC News.
Musk also said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast in 2020 that the mortality rate of Covid-19 was much lower than health officials estimated, NBC News reported.
Prior to Twitter’s ending of their Covid misinformation policy, the company had previously reported suspending more than 11,000 accounts for Covid misinformation as of September this year, according to BBC.
While coronavirus continues to spread and has not been eradicated, fewer Americans are dying from the illness than at the start of the pandemic, according to CBS News.
Johns Hopkins University says that nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday but the numbers are far lower than last winter, and are also a vastly undercounted because of reduced testing and reporting of the virus, CBS News reported.
About 28,100 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the most recent federal daily averages. One fifth of the U.S. population hasn't been vaccinated, and most Americans haven't gotten the latest boosters. Many have also stopped wearing masks, as a majority of venues aren't now requiring them, CBS News reported.
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