Thursday, August 06, 2020

Twitter Policy Re "Denial Of Established Scientific Facts" About COVID-19, Explained

Twitter, March 27, 2020:
An update on our content moderation work

We have broadened our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. ...

Under this guidance, we will require people to remove Tweets that include ...

* Denial of established scientific facts about transmission during the incubation period or transmission guidance from global and local health authorities, such as "COVID-19 does not infect children because we haven't seen any cases of children being sick."
Twitter's policy in action:
1. Donald Trump states lies about children and the coronavirus.

2. Journalist Aaron Rupar fact-checks Trump, quoting him verbatim with a link to his words, and labels those words "stunningly irresponsible".

3. Twitter suspends Rupar's account.
Note: Despite its stated goal of preventing the spread of misinformation re COVID-19, Twitter still does not have an option on their reporting menu for misinformation about COVID-19.
Someone named Bizarre Lazar has been conducting a Twitter experiment. He set up an account (@SuspendThePres) and has been tweeting Trump's tweets as if they originated from him. He encourages his readers to report him.

Twitter has suspended his account twice in three weeks (June 1 and June 22) and he had to delete the offending tweet. Twitter has done nothing regarding Trump's account and his original offending tweets are still posted. (Even when Twitter included a warning about one of Trump's tweets, saying it violated its police, the tweet was still visible.)
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