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Twitter has flagged Advocate Prashant Bhushan's tweet which promotes vaccine hesitancy against the Covid19 vaccines.

The advocate who has a following of 2.2 million on Twitter made recent remarks about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. These invited widespread criticism.

Dr. NK Arora, Chairman of Government of India's Covid working group also reacted to Bhushan's remarks, heavily criticising them. 

After days of criticism from various people on social media, Twitter finally added a disclaimer to a tweet by Prashant Bhushan.

The disclaimer says,

"This Tweet is misleading. Find out why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people."

[The contents of Bhushan's tweets are not reiterated here as we do not wish to disseminate inaccurate information]

In March 2020, following steps of Facebook to remove content with false information about COVID, Twitter also implemented a similar policy, wherein it said,
“We’re expanding our safety rules to include content that could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.”

Subsequently, vaccination and information around it was also included with such content moderation policy.

Existing content moderation policy of Twitter concerning COVID vaccination:

Twitter has a policy to tackle misinformation related to the pandemic, specifically. It has put a "strike system" in place, wherein depending on the repeated behaviour of a user, action is taken. According to such policy, vaccine hesitancy has been dealt with as follows:

False and misleading information about:

• “The pandemic or COVID-19 vaccines that invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces.
• Vaccines and vaccination programs which suggest that COVID-19 vaccinations are part of a deliberate or intentional attempt to cause harm or control populations.
• How vaccines are developed, tested, and approved by official health agencies as well as information about government recommendations.
• Twitter has also introduced a strike system based on two actions; Tweet deletion and labelling. For severe violations of the above, Twitter would require to delete content and would accrue 2 strikes. Whereas, labelling the content with additional context from twitter with regards to the nature of content would accrue 1 strike.”

“Repeated violations of this policy are enforced against the user on the basis of the number of strikes an account has accrued for violations of this policy:

• 1 strike: No account-level action
• 2 strikes: 12-hour account lock
• 3 strikes: 12-hour account lock
• 4 strikes: 7-day account lock
• 5 or more strikes: Permanent suspension”

 

Also Read: Does content promoting Vaccine Hesitancy fall under 'misleading information'?