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Twitter’s decision to no longer enforce its COVID-19 misinformation policy, quietly posted on the site’s rules page and listed as effective Nov. 23, 2022, has researchers and experts in public health seriously concerned about the possible repercussions. Health misinformation is not new. A classic case is the misinformation about a purported but now disproven link between autism and the MMR vaccine based on a discredited study published in 1998. Such misinformation has severe consequences for public health. Countries that had stronger anti-vaccine movements against diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccines faced a higher incidence of pertussis in the late-20th century, for example. As a researcher who studies social media, I believe that reducing content moderation is a significant step in the wrong direction, especially in light of the uphill battle social media platforms face in combating misinformation and disinformation. And the stakes are especially high in combating medical misinformation. Misinformation on social media There are three key differences between earlier forms of misinformation and misinformation spread on social media. First, social media enables misinformation to spread at a much greater scale, speed and scope. Second, content that is sensational and likely to trigger emotions is more likely to go viral on social media

December 31, 2022 5:49 pm ET You know what is almost as good as Ohio State winning a football game? When our rival, Michigan, lays an egg and loses on a national stage. The game isn’t over yet, it’s just at halftime, but nothing has gone well for the school that calls Ann Arbor their home. Prior to the game, ESPN’s College GameDay made their picks and not one of them selected TCU. Nobody really saw this coming but it was glorious to watch. Not only that, Twitter had a field day with the way our rivals played during the first half of the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl. Take a look below at some of the best tweets during the first half as TCU is leading 21-6. Buy Buckeyes TicketsContact/Follow us @BuckeyesWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Ohio State news, notes, and opinion. Follow Michael Chen on Twitter. Let us know your thoughts, and comment on this story below. Join the conversation today Former Ohio State linebacker Darron Lee One thing I learned about Mccarthyism was that it was all FAKE! — Darron Lee (@DLeeMG8) December 31, 2022 Reddit Michigan: “We have the best offensive line

Fidelity, which was among the group of outside investors that helped Elon Musk finance his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, has slashed the value of its stake in Twitter by 56%. The recalculation comes as Twitter navigates a number of challenges, most the result of chaotic management decisions — including an exodus of advertisers from the network. Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund stake in Twitter was valued at around $8.63 million as of November, according to a monthly disclosure and Fidelity Contrafund notice first reported today by Axios. That’s down from $19.66 million as of the end of October. Macroeconomic trends are likely to blame in part. Stripe took a 28% internal valuation cut in July, while Instacart this week reportedly suffered a 75% cut to its valuation. But Twitter’s wishy-washy policies post-Musk clearly haven’t helped matters. The network’s become less stable at a technical level as of late, on Wednesday suffering outages after Musk made “significant” backend server architecture changes. Twitter recently laid off employees in its public policy and engineering department, dissolving the group responsible for weighing in on content moderation and human rights-related issues such as suicide prevention. And the company’s raised the ire of regulators after

Twitter is closing its Seattle office after the company stopped paying millions of dollars in rent, the New York Times reported Thursday.

In October 2020, he caused a stir when he announced on Twitter that he had secured funding to take Tesla private $420 per share. This tweet led to an ...

The so-called Twitter Files, which started being released at the start of December, have so far generated a lot more discussion of the metacontroversies surrounding their release than of what’s actually in the “files” themselves: controversies about who released the files, who reported on them, the way they were reported, the wrong-headed political beliefs of some of those involved in the reporting. That’s too bad, because for all its very real faults, the Twitter Files story is an important and consequential piece of reporting that everyone — particularly on the Left — should be paying attention to. Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it. The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state. And while Bari Weiss may not be interested in them, there are major implications for

Twitter experienced a global outage late Wednesday, according to numerous reports from Twitter users and the online tracker Downdetector.

The issues surfaced several days after Elon Musk said he had shut down one of the company’s major data centers.Send any friend a storyAs a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.The cause of widely reported Twitter outages on Wednesday was not immediately clear.Credit...Carlos Barria/ReutersDec. 28, 2022, 9:08 p.m. ETTwitter users in widespread locations said they were having problems with the service on Wednesday evening, days after Elon Musk said he had shut down one of the company’s data centers in Sacramento. The issues primarily hit users of the company’s site for desktop computer users, according to Down Detector, while some complained that its mobile app also experienced trouble.The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. Some users reported that they had been logged out of Twitter, while others said they could not view replies to their tweets but had access to other parts of the service. Other users said they had encountered error messages while scrolling through their timelines, the primary feed of tweets that people see when they log in to Twitter.The errors began around 7 p.m. Eastern time, according to Down Detector, a service that monitors web

Filmmaker Rian Johnson gave the internet the best Christmas gift imaginable: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and another take-laden, zeitgeist-y pop culture moment fit for pointing and laughs. Glass Onion is the follow-up to Johnson’s successful and beloved 2019 film Knives Out, starring Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, and Chris Evans. The sequel hit Netflix Dec. 23, just in time for everyone and their family to gather ’round and take in the two-hour murder mystery. That includes conservative media personality Ben Shapiro. On Monday, Shapiro spent 17 tweets ranting about (and spoiling) the plot and politics of the film. He hated both. Glass Onion centers around Edward Norton’s tech billionaire Miles Bron, who invites a group of disparate friends to his private island for a COVID-19 lockdown murder mystery game (yes, there’s an actual murder at the center of it) that ends up being, as Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc exasperates, “so dumb.” Tech billionaires are all the rage these days, and Shapiro and other netizens are drawing conclusions between the metaphors and themes in Johnson’s brazen billionaire and 2022’s billionaire of the moment, Elon Musk. Rian Johnson’s politics is as lazy as his writing. His take on the universe

Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the ...