TWITTER TO BAN USERS PERSISTING WITH COVID-19 LIES

Tue 02 March 2021:

Twitter announced in a blogpost on Monday, is designed to strengthen the social network’s existing Covid-19 guidance, which has led to the removal of more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5m accounts worldwide.

“We believe the strike system will help to educate the public on our policies and further reduce the spread of potentially harmful and misleading information on Twitter, particularly for repeated moderate and high-severity violations of our rules,” the company said.

The change was a “move in the right direction”, said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news.

“As always, the devil is in the details,” she said. “The success of the policy will depend on how consistently it is applied, how accurately it is applied, and how well the appeals process works.”

The one-to-many messaging service introduced a “strike system” that will gradually escalate to a permanent ban after the fifth offending tweet.

Twitter users will be notified when a tweet is labeled as misleading or needs to be removed for breaking the platform’s rules, earning a strike, according to the company.

The second and third strikes will each result in the violating account being blocked for 12 hours.

The new Twitter policies come after Facebook banned vaccine misinformation entirely in early February, using a similar strike system that suspends users who post false claims and permanently removes those with multiple violations.

Twitter late last year began calling on users to remove dangerously misleading Covid-19 claims, including suggestions that vaccines are used to harm or control people.

The service also targeted baseless claims about adverse effects of vaccines or questioning the reality of the pandemic.

The strike system is similar to what Twitter applies to election-related misinformation, which led to former U.S. President Donald Trump being permanently banned for repeated violations, including language that the platform said could incite violence and questioning the integrity of the voting process.

Other social media giant Facebook is specifically targeting pages and groups with the new guidelines, which are not specific to Covid-related content and will also target falsehoods including suggesting vaccines cause autism – a baseless claim made by many in the anti-vax community.

Twitter, Facebook, and platforms such as Instagram and TikTok began adding links and labels to any information about Covid-19 early in the pandemic. On Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, posting even the term “Covid-19” will get a post accompanied by a warning label and a link to accurate information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.