A new Twitter policy was introduced, which is another way to suppress freedom of speech instead of letting individuals judge freely what information is inaccurate or not. It is a way to prevent further discussion or debate about the crisis. Under the “crisis misinformation policy,” Twitter officials could censor or disable tweets they deemed misleading related to a human welfare emergency. The company further defined the definition of a crisis, which is compatible with the UN definition and evaluations of the crisis. It’s characterized as a situation in which one’s life, physical safety, health, or basic survival are all jeopardized.

In response to deceptive tweets, Twitter used a range of suppression measures as soon as evidence was provided to claim that the information was inaccurate. Such measures include removing posts from suggested content and adding a label on the person’s highly visible tweets and on his or her profile accounts. Other measures to prevent misleading tweets from being amplified include not suggesting them on Twitter Search, Home, and Explore.

The company said that this global policy would guide its effort to provide reliable content and to prevent unreliable content during a time of crisis. False information eroded public trust and exacerbated the situation in already vulnerable areas. That is true. False information keeps people in the loop from knowing what is really going on. It tosses others and society into a rabbit hole. Corrupted policies, politicians, movements, and the mainstream media have a lot to do with it. Part of the mainstream media is reporting another with accurate evidence and facts while the other part is not or dismisses them in favor of a certain group.

This is the same for individuals and social media. Individuals and social media have their own standpoints that are different from others, especially now. The two political parties’ views create a division between people and society. As a result, will Twitter officials take sides in censoring tweets? Given the past record of Twitter banning or suspending subscribers due to their criticism, it is hard to put trust in the company to provide reliable content. It is hard to tweet about political issues without knowing whether the tweet will be censured or not.

It is clear that social media companies introduce new policies to avoid criminal or terrorist activities on their platforms. According to Time, they also pledged to combat the spread of terrorist propaganda online by joining the Christchurch Call. The stages shared identified information about the Buffalo shooter’s video and declaration between them through an industry group, the Worldwide Web Gathering to Counter Fear-based Oppression (GIFCT). It allows platforms to exchange encoded copies of terrorist material, known as hashes, that they have deleted from their sites. Once the hash code matches the hash database for criminal content, it quickly and easily remove a duplicate of a terrorist video. Hasting, according to Dia Kayyali, associate director at Mnemonic, and Jacob Berntsson, policy and research director at Tech Against Terrorism, has its problem. To return to a different code, all that was required was a modest amount of file altering.

Meta used humans to moderate any copies of terrorist videos and the machine learning tools to catch any of those duplicates. GIFCT was looking into alternatives to hashing for exchanging information about terrorist content between platforms. However, those efforts were still in the early stages.

According to experts, the government and the media have a part to play. Domestic terrorists are not classified in the same way as foreign terrorists under U.S. law. As a result, clarifying or assurance of legality that they did when dealing with content from Al Qaeda and ISIS was impossible. As in the case of the Buffalo shooting, the motive behind the shooting is muddled between hate crime and terrorist attack. The shooter was motivated by political conspiracy ideas and skin color issues. Regardless of whether domestic and foreign terrorists are classified, it should not prevent the removal of videos or posts that support criminal or terrorist activity. The First Amendment does not cover all sorts of expression. Pornography involving children and speech that is harmful to people and society is examples of these categories.

The point is that social media platforms do not have to remove subscribers’ posts or ban anyone not in favor of a certain group’s speech. Being able to have healthy political or non-political ideas or discussions is necessary on the platform. It aids others in the processing of information, the development of strategies, and the explanation of certain issues. In the opposite direction, social media platforms must remove speech in videos or posts that is not protected by the First Amendment.