The social platform is trying to cut down on false reports on the vaccines.
As production ramps up between Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson on their COVID-19 vaccines and they begin to proliferate throughout the United States and beyond, there is still a lot of uncertainty and caution breeding among the people. Concerns have ranged from more reasonable worries about potential side effects of the vaccine to outright conspiracy theories about it containing tracking devices. It is at this time that ensuring as many people are vaccinated as possible is vital, and so, in an effort to keep misinformation from affecting this effort, Twitter has decided to clamp down.
Earlier in the week, in a corporate blog post, Twitter announced that they would be enacting a new five-strike policy targeted at those that spread misinformation about COVID-19, the current state of the pandemic, and most importantly, the vaccines. According to the blog post, the reason they opted for a five-strike policy instead of immediate retaliation is to “educate people on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the opportunity to further consider their behavior and their impact on the public conversation.”
Here is how the new strike system works:
- First offense: Warning issued, no account-level action
- Second offense: 12-hour account lock
- Third offense: Another 12-hour account lock
- Fourth offense: Seven-day account lock
- Fifth offense: Permanent suspension
“Labels will first be applied by our team members when they determine content violates our policy,” Twitter explained.
“Those assessments will be used to further inform our automated tools and to advance our proactive capacity to identify and label similar content across the service. Our goal is to eventually use both automated and human review to address content that violates our COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rules.”
According to a recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, at least 15% of Americans have insisted they will not get a vaccine under any circumstances. This is an improvement over past months, though health officials are still trying to spread the word of their safety as much as possible.
