While Americans were getting ready for Thanksgiving, Twitter was quietly dissolving its COVID-19 content policy.
In a recent transparency report, the platform noted that as of November 23, “Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” The platform has been one of the most aggressive censors of COVID-19 information that runs counter to the accepted narrative.
According to the report, the platform used its COVID-19 misleading information policy to suspend over 11,000 accounts and remove nearly 98,000 pieces of content worldwide from Jan. 2020 to Sept 2022. The numbers just further emphasize that Twitter’s dropping of the policy is a huge shift for the platform.
It’s worth noting that the old policy didn’t merely censor controversial claims that “5G wireless is causing COVID-19” or even “that COVID-19 is not real.” For two years, the platform permanently suspended medical doctors who dared criticize the COVID-19 vaccines.
It removed content that drew attention to growing numbers of adverse events to COVID-19 vaccines reported in the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and it slapped warning labels on the tweets of elected officials trying to get information to their constituents.
Last December, the platform famously permanently suspended Dr. Robert Malone, an early mRNA researcher who has been credited as the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology.
Malone tweeted a video entitled "The Pfizer Inoculations For COVID-19 -- More Harm Than Good -- Video," according to purported screenshots. Along with the video link, Malone tweeted: “Pfizer 6 month data which shows that Pfizer's COVID-19 inoculations cause more illness than they prevent. Plus an overview of the Pfizer trial flaws in both design and execution."
The platform was also notorious for throttling the reach of tweets with a misleading information label which would allow the tweet to be seen but not liked or retweeted. The platform slapped variations on the words “This Tweet is misleading. Find out why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people." President of America's Frontline Doctors Dr. Simone Gold, Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) all tweeted out content that received this label.
Others affected by Twitter’s COVID-19 policies include: Dr. Zev Zelenko, who was one of the first to treat COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine, White House Coronavirus Taskforce advisor Dr. Scott Atlas, former researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health Dr. Li-Meng Yan, American Heart Association and the European Journal of Medicine and Health Sciences.
MRC Free Speech America released a study in February citing 808 cases of Big Tech censorship related to shared COVID-19 content. Nearly half of the cases in that study (386) came from Twitter censorship. To date, MRC Free Speech America has documented 616 cases of Twitter censorship related to COVID-19 in our unique CensorTrack.org database.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
