Just a month after purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk’s company has ceased enforcing its Covid misinformation policy, according to reports.
The change to Twitter’s Covid misinformation policy came last week and went under the radar until some eagle-eyed users of the social media platform noticed it, CBS News reported.
Twitter posted on their website that “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”
CBS News reports that this policy was established for the first time in May 2020.
Now, because of the new recent change, public health officials are concerned that misinformation about the virus could spread.
Musk, who has been a vocal critic of how health officials reacted to the coronavirus pandemic, said during Tesla’s first-quarter 2020 earnings call that the stay-at-home orders were “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all their constitutional rights,” According to NBC News.
Musk stated that Musk believed in “The Joe Rogan Experience” Podcast in 2020: The mortality rate for Covid-19 was lower than what health officials thought, NBC News reported.
Prior to Twitter’s ending of their Covid misinformation policy, the company had previously reported suspending more than 11,000 accounts for Covid misinformation as of September this year, according to BBC.
According to CBS News, although coronavirus is still spreading and cannot be eradicated completely, the number of Americans who are suffering from it has fallen since the beginning of the pandemic.
Johns Hopkins University reports that national COVID incidences averaged almost 38,800 cases per day by Monday. But, these numbers are much lower than last season and are significantly undercounted due to reduced reporting and testing. CBS News also reported the findings.
According to federal daily statistics, around 28,100 COVID patients were admitted each day and 313 people died. The U.S. has a fifth of its population that have not been vaccinated and the majority have not received the most recent boosters. CBS News reports that many have stopped using masks because not all venues require them.