Explaining Twitter's inability to effectively moderate content during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT: Social media platforms routinely face pressure to restrict harmful content while protecting free speech; however, prior theory suggests that platform design might undermine the efficacy of content moderation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, major social media platforms removed content that violated their medical misinformation policies. Although controversial, it is widely assumed that these interventions, such as deplatforming and content removal, are efficacious; however, this claim has not been evaluated based on evidence. We therefore evaluated the efficacy of Twitter's attempts to curtail vaccine misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that several clusters of vaccine skeptical accounts generated a larger share of tweets about vaccines, increased in virality, and continued

SUBMITTER: Broniatowski DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12528495 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature