UNMASKED

Twitter Ditches Its COVID Misinformation Policy

The site stopped enforcing its rules on misleading information about the pandemic last week, Twitter said.

Twitter says it has stopped imposing its COVID misinformation policy in the latest shakeup of the company since Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover. The policy first came into force two years ago in a bid to combat “harmful misinformation” about the coronavirus and its vaccines, with some 11,000 accounts suspended from Twitter for breaching the rules between January 2020 and September 2022. While no formal announcement appears to have been made about the policy being killed off, some Twitter users spotted a note posted to the policy’s page on Twitter’s website. “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the note reads. News of the change comes after Musk promised to reinstate previously banned accounts in a “general amnesty” as early as this week.