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Under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk, social media platform Twitter has abandoned efforts to prevent the spread of harmful erroneous data about COVID-19 on its platform, terrible experts who say fake and misleading fitness data can harm Americans and put lives at risk.
“As of November 23, 2022, Twitter no longer enforces the COVID-19 misleading data policy,” the company noted on its website.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public fitness responses have been seriously hampered by a plague of misinformation in virtual spaces.
In late 2020, the World Health Organization issued a call to action to combat what it called the “infodemic,” which aimed to “mitigate the damage caused by misinformation about fitness” that can cause confusion, mistrust, destructive behaviors, and can prolong and accentuate outbreaks. The WHO has launched a debunking crusade to try to combat misinformation, issuing advisories claiming that medical masks do not cause oxygen deprivation and that drinking bleach does not protect you from COVID-19 but will harm it.
At a press conference earlier this year, Katherine O’Brien, director of WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologics, noted that false and misleading data on social media is not trivial. “It’s not just about social media chatter,” O’Brien said. said. ” It really has an effect on what other people do, what they decide to do, what they decide to do for themselves, for their children, for their families. So that’s something we take very seriously. “”
But the challenge has been persistent and has crippled fitness responses, likely exacerbating the number of illnesses and deaths caused by the pandemic. They received their vaccine data from social media than from other data resources. In November, KFF’s ballot found that 78% of American adults believed or were unsure about at least one of the 8 lies about the pandemic or COVID-19 vaccines.
Much of the misinformation has been amplified in the United States through Republican politicians, leading to divergent aptitude results between parties. A study conducted in February of this year found that the Republican political association was linked to an increase in the prescription of useless remedies for COVID-19. , hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. And partisan dissemination of incorrect data has claimed lives. A June study found that counties with a majority of Republican voters consistently experienced 72. 9 more COVID-19 deaths out of 100,000 citizens compared to predominantly Democratic counties in the first two years of the pandemic, with adoption of the COVID-19 vaccine accounting for about 10% of the difference.
“In cases like this pandemic, data saves lives,” Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s fitness emergencies programme, said at a news conference this year. “In some cases, [it’s] more saving than having a vaccine in the feeling that the wrong data sends you to very, very bad places. “
Amid the scourge of misinformation, Twitter began stepping up its efforts in 2020 to combat the scourge on its platform, revealing new policies that questioned accounts, removed false or misleading content, annotated potentially misleading content, and banned infringing accounts. In September 2022, prior to Musk’s acquisition, Twitter boasted that enforcing its COVID-19 disinformation policy had led it to challenge 11. 72 million accounts, suspend 11,230 accounts, and remove 97,674 pieces of content since 2020.
Continued enforcement of its disinformation policies would “ensure that users can seamlessly locate credible data in this critical phase” of the pandemic, the company wrote.
But under Musk, the company’s priorities have obviously changed. Musk himself has a murky relationship with COVID-related fitness misinformation. In March 2020, he tweeted that “coronavirus panic is stupid,” as well as the lie that young people are “essentially immune. “to COVID-19. However, he later tweeted about vaccines.
Yesterday, Musk sparked a skirmish with Apple after claiming the tech giant had “nearly stopped” advertising on Twitter and threatened Twitter’s app from its App Store. had filtered search terms for COVID-19-related apps.
The decentralization of credible content and speech on Twitter is very likely to generate even more fear among fitness officials about misinformation on social media platforms.
“When someone reaches a position in life where they have so much potential influence over how data is shared with communities, they take on a lot of responsibility,” the WHO’s Mike Ryan said earlier this year, referring to Musk’s upcoming acquisition of Twitter. Mr. Musk is well in his efforts for the quality of the data we all receive. “
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