New Twitter Censorship Rules Raise Transparency Questions | RealClearPolitics
After years of being on the defensive over data breaches, privacy invasion, censorship and monopoly concerns, social media platforms are leveraging the current public health crisis to vastly expand and entrench their power in an ostensibly free society. Last week Facebook announced it was banning the use of its platform to organize many kinds of anti-lockdown protests, expanding its reach from the digital to the physical world. For its part, Twitter took the opportunity to sweepingly expand its censorship policy, heightening its role in deciding what constitutes truth.
On Wednesday, Twitter announced that it was broadening our guidance on unverified claims and that, with respect to COVID-19-related posts, unverified claims that have the potential to incite people to action & or cause widespread panic/social unrest may be considered a violation of our policies. It cited this as an example of such now-banned posts: the National Guard just announced that no more shipments of food will be arriving for two months run to the grocery store ASAP and buy everything.