Twitter
Policy Decisions
COVID-19Twitter announced a new set of measures it would be implementing to combat “COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.” The first measure was labeling tweets that Twitter deems to contain “misleading information”, something the corporation had been doing for a while regarding other topics (such as the election). They also mention how many tweets they have removed and challenged since they started suppressing dialogue around COVID-19:
Starting today, we will begin applying labels to Tweets that may contain misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines, in addition to our continued efforts to remove the most harmful COVID-19 misleading information from the service. Since introducing our COVID-19 guidance, we have removed more than 8,400 Tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts worldwide.
Additionally, Twitter laid out a new strike system that would be used to give people the “opportunity to further consider their behavior and their impact on the public conversation”:
Through the use of the strike system, we hope to educate people on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the opportunity to further consider their behavior and their impact on the public conversation. […] Repeated violations of the COVID-19 policy are enforced against on the basis of the number of strikes an account has accrued for violations of the policy.
- One strike: no account-level action
- Two strikes: 12-hour account lock
- Three strikes: 12-hour account lock
- Four strikes: 7-day account lock
- Five or more strikes: permanent suspension