Yesterday, Twitter updated its safety policy to prohibit tweets that “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19”. This includes a number of different things, such as denying expert guidance, or tweets that misleadingly pretend to be from health authorities. The new guidelines will require users to remove offending tweets before they can tweet again – and they will be notified of this via email.
Once again, this is excellent advice from Twitter, and they are usually one of the front runners when it comes to trends like this that others will follow. Hopefully, if there is anything good that can come out of this situation, it will be that people start to think before they tweet from now on. Incorrect advice can have incredibly damaging effects socially, but sometimes a crisis can bring about a tipping point where people begin to take social and online safety more seriously.