In interviews with The Post, Twitter acknowledged the problem. The company removed the tags and reinstated the accounts after questions about 10 tweets and specific accounts.
“We’re always working to improve the security of our service and making sure we provide avenues of resolution when we’re wrong through our appeals processes,” Twitter spokeswoman Celeste Carswell said. “We acknowledge the mistakes made in these cases and are reviewing our team’s protocol to protect against such mistakes in the future. We appreciate the community’s feedback and remain focused on reducing harm and providing informative context on Twitter.”
Several users received messages from Twitter apologizing for the error. “Our support team has reviewed your account and it appears we made an error,” said an email reviewed by The Post. “We have determined that the Tweets are not in violation of our Covid-19 Misinformation Policy, so your account should be restored to full functionality. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and hope to see you back on Twitter soon.”
Johanna Po, an oral pathologist with a PhD in molecular biology who had one of her tweets last week misinformed (the flag was later removed), said the discussion of misused flags has been a big topic on scientific and medical communities on Twitter. . “This has happened to a large number of medical people and people in biological research,” she said.
It was not known how many tweets or accounts were affected by the mislabeling, but Po said that even if Twitter’s actions affect relatively few account holders, misapplied flags undermine the authority of the scientific and medical community and weaken efforts to fight the vaccine or Covid. misinformation.
“In terms of public perception, it calls into question our credibility as scientists,” she said. “If we put something on Twitter as a research study, and you say it’s wrong, that invalidates everything we’re saying.”
Emily Vraga, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in disinformation, said Twitter’s recent blunders are confusing people and fueling conspiracy theories.
“We know that when accurate information is labeled as false, people are less likely to think it is accurate, even when it is shown to be true,” she said. She added that long-term misapplication of the tag could also cause users to distrust Twitter’s disinformation systems entirely, rendering the tag useless.
Throughout the pandemic, Twitter has struggled to contain misinformation on its platform. In April 2020, Oxford University researchers published a study showing that nearly 60 percent of false claims about Covid remained online without a warning label. Anti-vaccine sentiment has also flourished on Twitter. A February report from Germany’s Marshall Fund institute found that vaccine skeptics significantly outnumbered the news media on Twitter. “Anti-vaccine promoters managed to evade platform policies, distorting the information system with large footprints during the second half of 2021,” the researchers wrote.
Exactly when the current problem began is uncertain, but it has been a topic of conversation among medical professionals and scientists on the platform since at least last Thursday, with tweets drawing attention to the issue garnering thousands of likes and retweets.
Some reports suggest that the affair started earlier.
On August 16, Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist who worked for 15 years as a medical reviewer at the Federal Food and Drug Administration and as a research associate at the National Institutes of Health, wrote about his experience after posting a headline about new vaccine research. The tweet, which he said he posted on July 28, was labeled as disinformation.
Miller deleted his tweet to re-enter his account, but he said the platform should apologize to him and other pro-vaccine, pro-science communicators whose tweets were flagged. “It shows you how disorganized the monitoring of disinformation on Twitter is,” he said. “They’re just a mess.”
Another user, Anita Cheng, a former molecular biologist who was involved with San Francisco’s emergency response team, said one of her tweets promoting the vaccination was mislabeled two weeks ago.
And Chantal Moore, a science and technology writer in Vancouver, said some of her tweets sharing information about how to stay safe by wearing N95 masks had been flagged since June. Moore did not file complaints about her previous posts, but the flag on a post in June that cited information from a CDC Instagram post was removed after The Post brought it to Twitter’s attention.
Other Twitter users had their tweets suspended or flagged after sharing CDC data on childhood COVID deaths, posting titles and links to study in highly regarded scientific journals, warning about the dangers of Covid for childrenand sharing a quote from a story of New York which highlighted the risk of Covid for pregnant women.
Several tweets that were dismissed as misinformation reinforced studies about long-term Covid, a devastating condition that affects millions and for which there is no cure. Biden announced last July that long-term Covid is a federally recognized disability, although many have struggled to receive disability benefits.
Farid Jalali, a gastroenterologist in Southern California, had a tweet reacting to an article in the scientific journal Nature about the continued risk of cardiovascular problems many months after a Covid infection has resolved. The label was later removed, but he said such errors make it harder for doctors to keep their patients informed.
“Evidence has become clear that repeated infections with Covid-19 can be harmful to an individual’s health, and therefore it is part of the duty of doctors to ensure that the public is aware of those risks,” he said. he. He noted that many doctors miss the connection of Covid with strokes, heart attacks and blood clots because they think the virus only attacks the respiratory system, when, in fact, Covid affects many organs throughout the body.
Helga Gutmane, co-founder of the Long Covid Research Initiative, a non-profit group that promotes research into long-term Covid said the misapplication of misinformation labels to tweets makes it harder to get scientific information about long-term Covid to the public. On Saturday, Twitter flagged as misinformation a tweet posted by the initiative linking to a Nature article on mother-to-baby transmission of Covid. Twitter later removed the tag, but the mislabeling confused her followers, Gutmane said.
Apparently, @TwitterSupport is freezing people’s accounts for research studies on Twitter, now.
hey, @Medscapewere you aware that your scientific article has been labeled as “covid disinformation” and that sharing it is apparently a prohibited offence? pic.twitter.com/rIfM5vsoow
— I’m ME (Jaime) (@exceedhergrasp1) August 18, 2022
Doctors said changing views about Covid have led to an increase in cyber attacks and possibly an increase in users reporting content on Twitter as misinformation. “Physicians who are advocating a more cautious approach to lifting COVID mitigation tend to be the physicians who are challenged and reported [for misinformation] and bullied,” said Graham Walker, an emergency physician whose tweet trying to combat anti-vaccine misinformation was flagged as misinformation by Twitter last week. The tag was later removed.
“It’s an all-out attack to extract factual information,” Jalali said. While in 2020 the public seemed united in efforts to defeat the virus, doctors said that now, people across the political spectrum often direct vitriol at anyone trying to raise awareness of the often devastating effects of Covid-19.
“The doctors who seem to be most challenged and criticized online are the ones who are trying to represent people who are still at a fairly high risk for Covid,” Walker said.
A report published in JAMA Internal Medicine last year found that one in four doctors had been harassed and attacked on social media. In March, a study by Science found that doctors and scientists who continued to warn about the dangers of Covid received a vicious attack, including death threats and rape. Last month, the American Medical Association published an article on how harassment of doctors is on the rise, especially online.
“You have 99 percent of the world who don’t want to pay attention to Covid and long Covid, they want to pretend it doesn’t exist,” Gutmane said. “It feels like we’re this tiny little cog in the machine, trying to stop the Titanic from sinking.”
