Twitter has said it will crack down on accounts that repeatedly publish misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
The social media platform said it will not hesitate to permanently suspend those who have blatantly misleading information about the pandemic and the various vaccines developed to combat the pandemic, and will label tweets to better inform users about it.
Similar to the line they took with former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about electoral fraud following his defeat in the 2020 US presidential election.
They will use a combination of automated and human reviewers to identify and label the false reports about coronavirus vaccines.
Those who choose to post dubious information on multiple occasions may initially qualify for a seven-day ban, but those who receive five or more “ warnings ” will be removed from the social media platform altogether.
In a press release, they wrote, “As health authorities deepen their understanding of COVID-19 and vaccination programs around the world, we will continue to strengthen the most current, up-to-date and authoritative information.”
This latest move follows on from their announcement last December that misinformation about vaccines would be removed from the platform.
There is an increasing upward trend in vaccine skepticism around the world, with more than 15 percent of Americans claiming that, in a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, they would “certainly not” get any of the three vaccines offered to them.
So far, the US has administered nearly 77 doses of the approved Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines, and a third single-dose shot from Johnson & Johnson was approved on Saturday.
US chief medical advisor to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has said that up to 90 percent of the US population must be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.
That means there is still a long way to go, and the number of people planning to refuse an injection is increasing.
That’s probably why Twitter has decided to step in to remove some of the misleading information that could be influencing people’s opinions online.
The most comprehensive study conducted in the UK found that 72 percent of people are willing to get vaccinated, with 16 percent still very insecure and 12 percent very reluctant to receive the injections.
The University of Oxford asked 5,114 people what they thought about taking a Covid-19 vaccine from the NHS, and the results were published in the journal Psychological Medicine.