Twitter Changes Rules For ‘Crisis’ Content Amid Ukraine War, Musk Takeover

TAccording to witter, it will start restricting content from crises situations such as the conflict in Ukraine. This was a statement made Tuesday by the company. It is a policy that could limit posts even though Elon Musk (the company’s potential new owner) has stated that he would prefer the company do the opposite.

Social media network Twitter will ban content which misleads its users regarding war crimes, mass attack and other events. “As soon as we have evidence that a claim may be misleading, we won’t amplify or recommend content that is covered by this policy across Twitter,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, writes in a blog post. A warning prompt will be applied over violating tweets, notifying users the post has run afoul of the company’s Crisis Misinformation Policy, and Twitter will disable likes, shares and retweets, reducing how far the tweet can spread. Roth says actions like these can reduce a tweet’s reach by 30% to 50%.

Twitter and other social media companies have turned to similar measures in fighting other forms of misinformation—prominently doing so during the last presidential election. Twitter is often seen as an innovator in this area, often leading similar initiatives by Meta (the parent company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Although the initiatives may appear noble, they place Twitter in a challenging position. They must decide what constitutes misinformation.

Under the new Crisis Misinformation Policy, Twitter plans to rely on “verification from multiple credible, publicly available sources, including evidence from conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more,” Roth writes.

Historically, no one has been satisfied with Twitter’s moderating actions. Liberals say Twitter doesn’t do enough. Conservatives, such as Musk, believe it does too many things. In the end, no one’s happy! It seems that Twitter has a hard time accepting it both ways.

This latest policy’s timing comes at an era of change for the company. Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in limbo, and while he hasn’t had much to say publicly about what he intends to do with Twitter, he has been pretty upfront about his desire for it to cut back on moderation. Musk has a great example of how he views the issue in this tweet:

Meanwhile, Twitter’s board is urging shareholders to approve the $54.20-a-share deal with Musk even as the company rolls out policies that Musk will almost certainly dislike.

For now, Musk has been mum on this latest change to how Twitter polices speech—key part of that sentence: “for now.”

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