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Musk, Twitter and Pandemic Misinformation

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Elon Musk has restored the accounts of several prominent spreaders of pandemic-related misinformation, including Simone Gold, The Intercept reported. In recent weeks, Twitter has also eliminated policies designed to filter out Covid misinformation. 

WALKER BRAGMAN; walkerbragman@gmail.com 
    Bragman is a journalist and cofounder of OptOut, a nonprofit news aggregation app for independent media.

Bragman presented a question to the Institute for Public Accuracy: “In a public health crisis where people are dying by the thousands each week, and millions are suffering the effects of an airborne virus, should we allow people who actively go out and downplay or spread misinformation about the crisis to spread freely over important platforms, like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?” Bragman said that the recently reinstated Twitter accounts are “brand-building off of misery and ignorance.”

Bragman noted that Twitter’s owner Musk himself “has promoted and winked at some of the narratives prominent from Covid deniers and minimizers.” Musk is “encouraging the idea that these brave truth tellers have been silenced,” when in reality “there’s a lot of money and power behind them. The lies that they push are part of an agenda to prevent government action. They’re not paid agents, but they’re certainly useful to those interests, and get used by them.”