Don’t auto trust social media – Twitter isn’t going to stop people posting COVID-19 misinformation anymore

There are threat actors and other annoying groups that focus on miss informing large groups of people with the goal of creating chaos. I have seen this behavior during COVID, elections and everything in between. It is common for bots to be used and the messages tend to be designed to create anger. I often see a tweet from a political figure on one topic and quickly SPAM bots start posting messages that have NOTHING TO DO with the topic at hand yet attempt to inject a thought that leads to pissing off a specific type of person. An example could be Elon Musk posting about his thoughts on Tesla auto parking. If you scroll through the comments of a post like this, you will find comments about politics (pro Trump or Biden), the Russia Ukraine war, COVID or anything that can spark a nerve in a large audience. One example response a Elon post from yesterday was this “Animals eat other animals because they don’t have a choice. You do. So if you can choose, then why choose to be cruel? Choose veganism” …. I mean why …. why ???? This one isn’t hate related but just nonsense, which is obviously just bots pushing comments across multiple posts.

I bring up this topic because most social media sources know this is a problem and have been implementing steps to reduce the noise. Twitter, however, is taking a huge step back by removing such defenses. The expectation is now we will see a huge increase in toxic tweeting along with toxic comments. This means it will be hard to trust anything posted on twitter. Graham Cluely posted about this HERE.

In short, you can use twitter, but you need to question anything posted. I would not see twitter as a trusted source for critical information such as the election, COVID, or anything import. Twitter is fine to see what your favorite actor is doing but that’s about it.

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