Elon Musk should immediately get rid of Twitter's Covid 'misleading information' policy
On Saturday, Elon Musk tweeted that no change has been made to Twitter’s content moderation policies.
I began reading them over.
As a former newspaper editor, I think most of the policies are Ok and, for the most part, necessary — with one big glaring exception: the so-called “Covid-19 misleading information policy.”
This policy should be immediately destroyed, ripped up, the hard drives should be wiped of it, and Twitter should promise it will never again adopt such a policy.
The policy is arbitrary and capricious and there was never any reason for a publishing platform to have anything like it.
This is the policy as it now appears on Twitter’s website:
It’s a disaster starting from the very first line, from the admonition that “You may not use Twitter’s services to share false or misleading information about COVID-19 which may lead to harm.”
There is, obviously, no conceivable way to determine what is “false” or “misleading” and what information “may lead to harm” — and there never was.
The same can be said for everything highlighted above.
What is a conspiracy theory and what is true? Who can say?
What counts as “credible reporting”?
It’s all arbitrary.
Science is not settled, drugs are frequently withdrawn from the market, the media is biased, new treatments are discovered — and things often turn out to be much different than they initially appeared.
And no publisher — or bulletin board, depending on your conception of what Twitter is — should ever have a policy of deferring to the government for a determination of what is true and what is false.
Here’s more of the policy:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misinformation-policy
It’s this policy that was used to ban many doctors and other researchers questioning the government line on Covid-19 origins, treatment and the vaccines, and that prevented people worldwide from accessing lifesaving information.
The harm is incalculable and can be counted in human lives of those denied early treatment for Covid and those harmed or killed by the vaccines.
Among those banned under this policy were Dr. Jessica Rose, the brilliant Canadian microbiologist and VAERS researcher; Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who dedicated her medical practice in Texas to early treatment of Covid patients; and researcher Edward Dowd, who has made a serious and concerted study of the record-breaking rise in excess deaths following the vaccine rollout, especially among millennials.
There are likely hundreds more — maybe more than a thousand. They should be immediately reinstated, just as Thomas Jefferson, when winning the presidency in 1800, immediately freed everyone who’d been jailed under the Sedition law. Everyone… “without asking what the offenders had done, or against whom they had offended,” as he wrote in a letter to Abigail Adams.
A new regime is now in place at Twitter headquarters, and Musk has quickly removed the top executives who approved of this Covid-19 policy.
But the policy itself still stands, and the people silenced under it are still banned from the platform.
There’s no reason to wait to convene a content moderation council.
The policy should be torn in two, and all those silenced immediately re-instated.
Time is of the essence, and we need to hear their voices.
Shared on Gettr and TruthSocial.
Having been personally persecuted (such as being permanently banned from LinkedIn) for having dared even question matters and merely stating the actual facts and statistics, I totally agree.
What gives these people the right to say what is truth or what is not, or even to believe that they have any right to silence anyone who simply disagrees with them. Such actions only prove that they are closed minded, self-serving, and completely oblivious to anything they don't choose to hear.