Under Musk‘s ownership, Twitter stopped taking action against tweets breaching its Covid rules, as of Wednesday, 23 Nov 2022. Twitter had previously suspended more than 11,000 accounts for Covid misinformation as of September 2022.
The former president who promoted and supported an attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of the presidential election was also invited back. His account was permanently suspended after the insurrection. Apparently 62,000 suspended accounts have been re-instated. Twitter also reinstated the personal account of US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, banned in January 2022. Now that accounts that spread misinformation have been given amnesty, it is unclear if they will return, or new ones will be emboldened to share incorrect information, that could influence the decisions people make about their health.
I have used Twitter extensively throughout the pandemic to learn about the latest research and trends as the virus spread. I have been seeing these Twitter feeds report that they are loosing thousands of followers after Musk took control of the company. Republican politicians on the other hand are gaining thousands of followers. Notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Representative Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif.; and Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., lost about 100,000 Twitter followers since Musk bought Twitter, while Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, gained more than 300,000. Exactly what is causing these trends is not yet known.
Musk fired thousands of employees which will clearly result in far less moderation of hate speech and the resulting violence. He was forced to pause the initial launch of an $8 per month Twitter Blue service after users abused the system by purchasing blue check marks to impersonate brands and famous people. Drug company Eli Lilly, who manufactures Insulin, had to apologized for a misleading tweet in which someone pretending to be the company wrote, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” After that debacle, the drug company suspended advertising on Twitter worth millions of dollars. Musk banned some impersonators before he shut the service down, raising questions about his definition of free speech.
Experts have argued that there has been an exponential increase in hate speech, harassment and misinformation on the platform since the billionaire purchased the social media site. Barbara F. Walter, has written about the potential for social media to fuel a decentralized civil war. She studied civil wars and insurrections in foreign countries for the CIA and realized that eh United States is backsliding towards armed conflict as well thanks in part to social media promoting extremism. Extremism generates more clicks.
