Guidelines | HKS Misinformation Review
As new information on the epidemiological nature of COVID-19 infections and its impact on public safety evolves, so do claims on which objective facts constitute it (Yong, 2020). Twitter has been tasked with ensuring that their users maintain a basic level of consensus around public safety guidelines and other information relative to personal and public health (Skopeliti and Bethan, 2020), by for example centralising access to local health organisations and representatives, flagging and at times deleting "misleading" Tweets that contradict such sources. But with diverging guidelines and facts occasionally opposing even authorities — notably ex-U.S. President Trump, the American Centre, National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organisation — the platform has struggled to determine whom to attribute ultimate authority for reliable information about COVID-19 transmission, treatment and protection.
In this context, we find that English-speaking publics that interact with any of these authorities have at times been polarised around either Donald Trump or the World Health Organisation. As these authorities contradict each other, we find that Twitter begins to moderate — and ultimately suspend — authorities that disrupt the general consensus over COVID-19, particularly Donald Trump. We conclude that Twitter's moderation of problematic information on the virus demonstrates how the platform relies less on specific guidelines over what constitute true and false information than on the general consensus between public health authorities.
These findings suggest two main implications. First, Twitter's moderation of authoritative sources renders the platform an authority in its own right, as it ultimately decides which of these authorities can and cannot govern in its platform. Second, COVID-19 has pushed platform moderation of misinformation from detecting and suppressing technically inauthentic contents to information that affects the overall consensus over what constitutes correct information, leading the platform to sanction outliers or "extremes", and shrink its size down to a more homogeneous (and thereby cohesive) public sphere. Both of these implications constitute a few emerging characteristics of a now "post-Trump" Internet.
As new information on the epidemiological nature of COVID-19 infections and its impact on public safety evolves, so do claims on which objective facts constitute it (Yong, 2020). Heads of state, health organizations and the public have been frequently divided on such claims, such as whether asymptomatic people and children can contaminate others, whether one should use a mask, or if children can be contagious (Iati et al., 2020; O’Leary, 2020). In this context, governments and public health authorities have struggled to maintain a consensus with their local publics and each other (Starbird, 2020), hurting public trust in their capacities as main references about the pandemic (Bordia and Difonzo, 2004; Bostrom et al., 2015; Starbird et al., 2016).
In response, social media and reference platforms have been tasked with ensuring that their users maintain consensus around public safety guidelines and other information relative to public health (Skopeliti and Bethan, 2020). Since the early months of 2020, Google Search, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have set up centralized access points to information provided by local and global "authoritative sources" (Skopeliti and Bethan, 2020). Though some stakeholders continue to demand more radical platform redesign (Dwoskin, 2020), more modest measures include: prompting local guidelines on the virus whenever one searches or consults information about COVID-19 (Twitter, 2020); temporarily disabling the personalisation of Newsfeeds (Lyons, 2020); flagging contents (tweets, posts, videos) that disseminate contested claims (ibid); demoting "borderline" or suspicious contents like conspiracy theories and raising “authoritative contents” on top of search and recommendation results (The YouTube Team, 2019); and altogether deleting materials that pose a danger to public health, such as anti-vaccination or alternative medication (YouTube, 2020).
But with information about the virus being uncertain in the early months of the pandemic, one wonders how a platform like Twitter has adapted its COVID misinformation policy to tolerate the relative contingency of knowledge and facts about the virus. Not only have authoritative guidances on treatments and protection frequently changed, they have also contradicted each other. Guidances by the World Health Organisation, favoured by nearly all social media platforms, at times differed from what the Center for Disease and Control Prevention, the NIH and then-U.S. President Donald Trump advised. While such discordances are to be expected, we assume that it has at times created a crisis of authority in the platform — a "state of exception", as it were (Schmitt, 2005 [1932]) — that has pushed Twitter to take exceptional measures to maintain a baseline of consensus in its platform.