SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk may want to send “tweet” back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site he now calls X is here to stay — at least for now.

For one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says “tweet” to publish it. To repost it, you still tap “retweet.”

But it’s more than that.

With “tweets,” Twitter accomplished in just a few years something few companies have done in a lifetime: It became a verb and implanted itself into the lexicon of America and the world. Upending that takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world’s richest men.

“Language has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. And it can’t be controlled, it can’t created, it can’t be morphed. You don’t get to decide it,” said Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” about Twitter’s origins.

Twitter didn’t start out as Twitter. It was “twttr” — without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. The iPhone only came out in 2007.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams “went one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,” when he bought the URL for twitter.com from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said.

At the beginning, people didn’t “tweet” — it was “I’m going to twitter this,” Bilton recalled. But “twittered” doesn’t roll off the tongue and “tweet” soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere.

We’ve been tweeting for well over a decade. World leaders, celebrities and athletes, dissidents in repressive regimes, propaganda trolls, sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and actual queens. Former president Donald Trump’s incendiary use of the bird app quickly punted “tweet” into near-constant headlines during his presidency. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.

For now, we still tweet, retweet and quote tweet, and sometimes — perhaps not often enough — delete tweets. News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV programs scroll them. No other social network has a word for posting that’s entered the vernacular like “tweet” — though Google did the same for “googling.”

The Oxford English Dictionary added “tweet” in 2011. Merriam-Webster followed in 2013. The Associated Press Stylebook entered it in 2010.

“Getting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it,” said Jack Lynch, a Rutgers University English professor who studies the history of language. “Dictionaries are usually pretty tentative or cautious about letting new words in, especially for new phenomena, because they don’t want things to be just a flash in the pan.”

As Twitter grew into a global communications platform and struggled with misinformation, trolls and hate speech, its friendly brand image remained. The blue bird icon evokes a smile, like the Amazon up-turned-arrow smile — in contrast to the X that Musk has imposed.

Martin Grasser was two years out of art school when Twitter hired him for the logo redesign in 2011. His wasn’t the first bird logo for Twitter, but it would be the most enduring.

“They knew they wanted a bird. So we weren’t starting completely over, but they wanted it to be on par with Apple and Nike. That was really the brief,” he said.

Twitter launched Grasser’s design in May 2012; the company went public on Wall Street later that year.

One early in-house design shown to Grasser looked like “a flying goose with a tail. It looked kind of like a dragon. It was crazy,” he said. Jack Dorsey, another co-founder (and twice-CEO) wanted something simpler.

The bird represented a vision of Twitter as a friendly place “where everyone can weigh in and chat,” Grasser said.

“The round form evokes a sense of optimism, the bird even being sort of turned upward, as corny as that sounds, I think is different than a bird flying down or flat,” he said. “We wanted to give it this idea of like soaring.″

The word “Twitter” itself is playful, as is “tweet.” This was no accident, Bilton said.

Other names that floated as the platform started out included “Status” and “Friend Stalker.”

It was Noah Glass, another co-founder who never quite got the credit he deserved for his role in hatching Twitter, who had the winning idea.

Glass, Bilton said, “had been thinking about like heartbeats and emotions. He was going through a divorce and he literally went through the dictionary word by word until he came across the word twitter. And he just knew instantly that was it.”

“He was one of the four founders who had the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that this was about connecting with humans,” Bilton said. “It was inviting, it was emotional. It was about connecting with humans and your friends and your loved ones.”

Musk began his quest erasing Twitter’s corporate culture and image in favor of his own vision as soon as he took over the company in October 2022. He lost three-quarters of the company’s staff through firings, layoffs and voluntary departures, auctioned off furniture and décor, and upended policies on hate speech and misinformation. The rebranding to X was no surprise.

Twitter’s rebranding is rooted in ambition that Musk began to pursue nearly a quarter century ago after he sold his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq Computer. He set out to create a one-stop digital shop for finance called X.com — an “everything” service that would provide bank accounts, process payments, make loans and handle investments.

He has not given up on the dream. Twitter is now X, falling in line with Musk’s other X-named brands, SpaceX and Tesla’s Model X. Not to mention his young son, whom he calls “X.”

His goal for X is to turn it into an “everything” app — for video, photos, messaging, payments and other services, although he has given few details. For now, X.com is still, essentially Twitter.com, even as the blue bird and other playful tidbits start to disappear.

“There used to be a saying inside Twitter that Twitter was the company that couldn’t kill itself. I think that still rings true, whether it’s called Twitter or X,” Bilton said.

“I think that it’s kind of become a fabric of society. And even Elon Musk may not be able to break it.”

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The same day Elon Musk abruptly dropped Twitter’s name and bird logo as part of its supposed transition to an “anything app” called X, TikTok impishly announced it will begin letting its users post — you guessed it — text-based messages.

The popular Chinese-owned app, best known for lip-synced dances, often farcical “challenges” and other short videos, didn’t offer much explanation for the new feature. It did note in a statement that the service is “expanding the boundaries of content creation” by showcasing the written creativity users have previously had to share via comments and video captions.

TikTok announced the new feature late Monday.

It wasn’t clear to what extent users have embraced text posts in their first full day of availability. That’s partly because searching on variations of the term “text post” largely turned up examples of a popular video genre — those focused on text message phone conversations, typically selected for humorous effect. There were also a few brave users offering video explanations on how to make text posts.

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Meta unveiled an app to rival Twitter on Wednesday, appearing to target users looking for an alternative to the social media platform owned — and frequently changed — by Elon Musk.

Called Threads, the new offering is billed as a text-based version of Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram that the company says provides “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”

The app went live just after midnight Wednesday in the U.K. in Apple and Google Android app stores in more than 100 countries including the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan. Early celebrity users include chef Gordon Ramsay, the pop star Shakira and Mark Hoyle, better known as the YouTuber LadBaby.

Users get a Twitter-like microblogging experience, according to screenshots provided to media, suggesting that Meta Platforms has been gearing up to directly challenge the platform after Musk’s tumultuous ownership has resulted in a series of unpopular changes that have turned off users and advertisers.

There are buttons to like, repost, reply to or quote a “thread,” and counters showing the number of likes and replies that a post has received.

“Our vision is that Threads will be a new app more focused on text and dialogue, modeled after what Instagram has done for photo and video,” the company said.

Posts are limited to 500 characters, which is more than Twitter’s 280-character threshold, and can include links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.

Instagram users will be able to log in with their existing usernames and follow the same accounts on the new app. New users will have to set up an Instagram account.

Meta emphasized measures to keep users safe, including enforcing Instagram’s community guidelines and providing tools to control who can mention or reply to users.

Meta’s new offering, however, has raised data privacy concerns.

Threads could collect a wide range of personal information, including health, financial, contacts, browsing and search history, location data, purchases and “sensitive info,” according to its data privacy disclosure on the App Store.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey pointed it out in a snarky tweet saying, “All your Threads are belong to us” that included a screenshot of the disclosure. Musk replied “yeah.”

One place Threads won’t be rolled out is in the European Union, which has strict data privacy rules.

Meta has informed Ireland’s Data Privacy Commission that it has no plans yet to launch Threads in the 27-nation bloc, commission spokesman Graham Doyle said. The Irish watchdog is Meta’s main privacy regulator for the EU because the company’s regional headquarters is based in Dublin.

While Meta had teased Threads with a listing on Apple’s U.K. App Store earlier this week, it could not be found in the French, German or Dutch versions. The company is working on rolling the app out to more countries but cites regulatory uncertainty for its decision to hold off on a European launch.

Analysts said its success is far from guaranteed, citing Meta’s track record of starting standalone apps that were later shut down.

Also in question is whether it’s the right move for Meta, which has announced tens of thousands of layoffs over the past year amid a tech industry slowdown.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg also has been focusing on the metaverse, investing tens of billions of dollars in the virtual reality concept.

Meta risks “spreading itself too thin,” said Mike Proulx, a research director at Forrester, a global market research company. “Meta is banking on a moment in time amidst peak Twitter frustration. However, this window of opportunity is already flooded with Twitter alternatives including Bluesky, Mastodon, Spill, Post.News and Hive, which are all competing for Twitter’s market share.”

Even so, Threads could be a fresh headache for Musk, who acquired Twitter last year for $44 billion.

He’s made a series of changes that have triggered backlash, the latest being daily limits on the number of tweets people can view to try to stop unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data. He also is now requiring paid verification for users to access the online dashboard TweetDeck.

Musk’s rivalry with Zuckerberg could end up spilling over into real life. In an online exchange the two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a cage match face-off, though it’s unclear if they will actually make it to the ring.

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NEW YORK (AP) — In an interview this week, Twitter owner Elon Musk said users making false claims of stolen elections “will be corrected” on the platform.

Prompted by a CNBC reporter for extra assurance that would happen, Musk responded, “Oh yeah, 100%.”

Yet many such claims have thrived on Twitter in the week since former President Donald Trump spent much of a CNN town hall digging in on his lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him. Twitter posts that amplified those false claims have thousands of shares with no visible enforcement, a review of posts on the platform shows.

The contrast between Musk’s promise and the extent the claims are spreading on Twitter underscores a major challenge for social media companies trying to call out election conspiracy theories and falsehoods that Trump and his supporters continue to promote. That will only grow as the nation prepares for a presidential election next year in which Trump is again vying to be the Republican nominee.

It’s unclear whether Musk and his newly hired chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, are planning any changes to Twitter to crack down on the misinformation, which election experts and tech accountability advocates say heightens risks to election officials and erodes trust in democracy.

“Talk is cheap,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who now leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “It’s good that he acknowledges that it’s important for Twitter to act responsibly. … But then we have to see this action actually taken, because it’s happening right now.”

An analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs on behalf of The Associated Press surfaced the 10 most widely shared tweets promoting a “rigged election” narrative in the five days following Trump’s town hall.

While Twitter has a system in place for users to add context to misleading tweets, the 10 posts, which collectively amassed more than 43,000 retweets, had no such notes attached.

The most widely shared tweets included false claims from U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Kari Lake, a Republican who lost her bid for Arizona governor last year.

Twitter’s policy on civic integrity and misleading information says it “may” label or remove “unverified information about election rigging,” but the 10 tweets and dozens of others claiming a “stolen” or “rigged” election in 2020 or 2022 in recent days remained live and unlabeled on the platform as of Thursday, an AP search found.

In January 2022, months before Musk took over the platform that October, Twitter had already confirmed to CNN that it had stopped taking action against 2020 election misinformation, saying its policy was meant for use during an election cycle, not long after one.

False claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate have continued to gain traction on the platform and across social media since then, propelled by Trump, whose recent media appearances show he is making them a core talking point of his campaign for the GOP nomination.

Tech accountability advocates said it’s difficult to monitor content on a scale as large as Twitter and they note that Twitter is not the only platform where election misinformation surfaces. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites also play a role in spreading falsehoods.

But since he took over, Musk has reinstated notorious election deniers, overhauled Twitter’s verification system and gutted much of the staff that had been responsible for moderating posts. Those choices have allowed falsehoods to flourish, said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit watchdog group.

“I think they already had inadequate resources … but there’s no doubt that he’s making it worse,” Lehrich said. “And he’s effectively fired everyone responsible for trust and safety at Twitter, so at this point, they couldn’t enforce their own civic integrity policies if they tried.”

Twitter sent an automated reply when the AP asked for comment, as Twitter does to most media inquiries, and did not provide a response to the continued spread of election misinformation.

In an ideal world, platforms would help reduce the spread of false claims online with policies such as blocking known misinformation sources, labeling it, adopting community enforcement standards and deprioritizing misinformation in trending topics, said Anjana Susarla, a social media researcher and professor at Michigan State University.

Complicating Twitter’s response to the misinformation is Musk’s own use of the platform. He has used his Twitter account to amplify election-related conspiracy theories.

Last week, he tweeted a reply to a false claim that a conference hosted by the Center for Election Innovation and Research was “secret” and “HYPER PARTISAN.”

In the message broadcast to his nearly 140 million followers, Musk called the session “far left” and said it was strange that officials from “pivotal regions” would attend. In fact, the conference had its own public web page with links to its agenda, a list of speakers that included Republicans and Democrats, and a livestream that allowed anyone interested to watch the sessions.

Musk’s post drove other Twitter users to see the original tweet and pile on with stolen-election claims.

“He gets it … he knows the elections were stolen massively,” one Twitter user replied.

“Exactly. They’re coordinating the steal for 2024,” wrote another.

Becker, the center’s executive director, said when prominent Twitter users amplify falsehoods about election officials, “threats increase to their safety, to their offices, to their staff.”

“That makes democracy more vulnerable and puts stresses on them as human beings,” he said.

____

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Twitter under its 420-friendly owner Elon Musk earlier this year became the first major social media company to allow cannabis advertisements. Now, the platform is relaxing those rules in an attempt to lure in more advertisers from U.S. states where marijuana is legal.

“Going forward, certified advertisers may feature packaged cannabis products in ad creative,” Twitter said in a post on its website. Previously, cannabis advertisers could not show any products in their ads, nor could they actually promote their sale.

“They may also continue responsibly linking to their owned and operated web pages and e-commerce experiences for CBD, THC, and cannabis-related products and services,” Twitter said.

The billionaire Tesla CEO has been forced to make huge cost cuts and scramble to find more sources of revenue to justify his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. The platform also removed a ban on political advertisements in January.

Still, companies interested in advertising cannabis products on Twitter must comply with a long list of rules. They must be licensed and pre-authorized by Twitter, only target jurisdictions where they are licensed and refrain from targeting anyone under 21, among other policies.

Facebook parent Meta, Google and other major tech companies all prohibit cannabis ads. Google does allow ads for FDA-approved CBD products and topical, hemp-derived CBD products with THC content of 0.3% or less in California, Colorado, and Puerto Rico, but not for marijuana even in states where it is legal.

Musk became widely associated with marijuana usage in 2018 when he tweeted that he was mulling a buyout of Tesla for $420 per share – a price that was widely assumed to be tied to a specific time in the afternoon of April 20 when cannabis users annually celebrate the drug by partaking in it. Shortly after that August 2018 tweet, Musk smoked a marijuana joint on a podcast with Joe Rogan.

In a trial centered on whether Musk’s buyout tweet had misled Tesla investors, Musk testified the price of his offer wasn’t meant to be a marijuana reference while acknowledging why people might think it was.

“There is some, I think, karma around 420. I should question whether that is good or bad karma at this point,” Musk said on the witness stand.

The origins of the term “420” generally, were long murky. Some claimed it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it arose from a Bob Dylan song.

But a consensus has emerged that it started with a group of California high school students in the 1970s. With marijuana widely illegal at the time, a friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.

During fall of 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never found it, but the number stuck.

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Twitter has removed the verification check mark on the main account of The New York Times, one of CEO Elon Musk’s most despised news organizations.

The removal comes as many of Twitter’s high-profile users are bracing for the loss of the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the social media platform.

Musk, who owns Twitter, set a deadline of Saturday for verified users to buy a premium Twitter subscription or lose the checks on their profiles. The Times said in a story Thursday that it would not pay Twitter for verification of its institutional accounts.

Early Sunday, Musk tweeted that the Times’ check mark would be removed. Later he posted disparaging remarks about the newspaper, which has aggressively reported on Twitter and on flaws with partially automated driving systems at Tesla, the electric car company, which he also runs.

Other Times accounts such as its business news and opinion pages still had either blue or gold check marks on Sunday, as did multiple reporters for the news organization.

“We aren’t planning to pay the monthly fee for check mark status for our institutional Twitter accounts,” the Times said in a statement Sunday. “We also will not reimburse reporters for Twitter Blue for personal accounts, except in rare instances where this status would be essential for reporting purposes,” the newspaper said in a statement Sunday.

The Associated Press, which has said it also will not pay for the check marks, still had them on its accounts at midday Sunday.

Twitter did not answer emailed questions Sunday about the removal of The New York Times check mark.

The costs of keeping the check marks ranges from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure they are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out to public figures and others during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.

While the cost of Twitter Blue subscriptions might seem like nothing for Twitter’s most famous commentators, celebrity users from basketball star LeBron James to Star Trek’s William Shatner have balked at joining. Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk takes his blue check away.

The White House is also passing on enrolling in premium accounts, according to a memo sent to staff. While Twitter has granted a free gray mark for President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet, lower-level staff won’t get Twitter Blue benefits unless they pay for it themselves.

“If you see impersonations that you believe violate Twitter’s stated impersonation policies, alert Twitter using Twitter’s public impersonation portal,” said the staff memo from White House official Rob Flaherty.

Alexander, the actor, said there are bigger issues in the world but without the blue mark, “anyone can allege to be me” so if he loses it, he’s gone.

“Anyone appearing with it=an imposter. I tell you this while I’m still official,” he tweeted.

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.

Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of Twitter’s main reasons to mark profiles with a blue check mark starting about 14 years ago was to verify politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, as an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts that are impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks” are not household names and weren’t meant to be.

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Some parts of Twitter’s source code — the fundamental computer code on which the social network runs — were leaked online, the social media company said in a legal filing on Sunday that was first reported by The New York Times.

According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.

Twitter, based in San Francisco, noted in the filing that the postings infringe copyrights held by Twitter.

The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for $44 billion and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and trying to obtain his internal communications as part of ongoing oversight into the social media company’s privacy and cybersecurity practices, according to documents described in a congressional report.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Search for the word “climate” on Twitter and the first automatic recommendation isn’t “climate crisis” or “climate jobs” or even “climate change” but instead “climate scam.”

Clicking on the recommendation yields dozens of posts denying the reality of climate change and making misleading claims about efforts to mitigate it.

Such misinformation has flourished on Twitter since it was bought by Elon Musk last year, but the site isn’t the only one promoting content that scientists and environmental advocates say undercuts public support for policies intended to respond to a changing climate.

“What’s happening in the information ecosystem poses a direct threat to action,” said Jennie King, head of climate research and response at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit. “It plants those seeds of doubt and makes people think maybe there isn’t scientific consensus.”

The institute is part of a coalition of environmental advocacy groups that on Thursday released a report tracking climate change disinformation in the months before, during and after the U.N. climate summit in November.

The report faulted social media platforms for, among other things, failing to enforce their own policies prohibiting climate change misinformation. It is only the latest to highlight the growing problem of climate misinformation on Twitter.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, allowed nearly 4,000 advertisements on its site — most bought by fossil fuel companies — that dismissed the scientific consensus behind climate change and criticized efforts to respond to it, the researchers found.

In some cases, the ads and the posts cited inflation and economic fears as reasons to oppose climate policies, while ignoring the costs of inaction. Researchers also found that a significant number of the accounts posting false claims about climate change also spread misinformation about U.S. elections, COVID-19 and vaccines.

Twitter did not respond to questions from The Associated Press. A spokesperson for Meta cited the company’s policy prohibiting ads that have been proven false by its fact-checking partners, a group that includes the AP. The ads identified in the report had not been fact-checked.

Under Musk, Twitter laid off thousands of employees and made changes to its content moderation that its critics said undercut the effort. In November, the company announced it would no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation. Musk also reinstated many formerly banned users, including several who had spread misleading claims about climate change. Instances of hate speech and attacks on LGBTQ people soared.

Tweets containing “climate scam” or other terms linked to climate change denial rose 300% in 2022, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit Advance Democracy. While Twitter had labeled some of the content as misinformation, many of the popular posts were not labeled.

Musk’s new verification system could be part of the problem, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another organization that tracks online misinformation. Previously, the blue checkmarks were held by people in the public eye such as journalists, government officials or celebrities.

Now, anyone willing to pay $8 a month can seek a checkmark. Posts and replies from verified accounts are given an automatic boost on the platform, making them more visible than content from users who don’t pay.

When researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed accounts verified after Musk took over, they found they spread four times the amount of climate change misinformation compared with users verified before Musk’s purchase.

Verification systems are typically created to assure users that the accounts they follow are legitimate. Twitter’s new system, however, makes no distinction between authoritative sources on climate change and anyone with $8 and an opinion, according to Imran Ahmed, the center’s chief executive.

“We found,” Ahmed said, “it has in fact put rocket boosters on the spread of lies and disinformation.”

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Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation, raising concerns among public health experts and social media researchers that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.

Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter’s online rules: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

By Tuesday, some Twitter accounts were testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform’s hands-off approach, which comes after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk.

“This policy was used to silence people across the world who questioned the media narrative surrounding the virus and treatment options,” tweeted Dr. Simone Gold, a physician and leading purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!”

Twitter’s decision to no longer remove false claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines disappointed public health officials, however, who said it could lead to more false claims about the virus, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

“Bad news,” tweeted epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who urged people not to flee Twitter but to keep up the fight against bad information about the virus. “Stay folks — do NOT cede the town square to them!”

While Twitter’s efforts to stop false claims about COVID weren’t perfect, the company’s decision to reverse course is an abdication of its duty to its users, said Paul Russo, a social media researcher and dean of the Katz School of Science and Health at Yeshiva University in New York.

Russo added that it’s the latest of several recent moves by Twitter that could ultimately scare away some users and even advertisers. Some big names in business have already paused their ads on Twitter over questions about its direction under Musk.

“It is 100% the responsibility of the platform to protect its users from harmful content,” Russo said. “This is absolutely unacceptable.”

The virus, meanwhile, continues to spread. Nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University — far lower than last winter but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,100 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the most recent federal daily averages.

Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, most Americans haven’t gotten the latest boosters, and many have stopped wearing masks.

Musk, who has himself spread COVID misinformation on Twitter, has signaled an interest in rolling back many of the platform’s previous rules meant to combat misinformation.

Last week, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” to account holders who had been kicked off Twitter. He’s also reinstated the accounts for several people who spread COVID misinformation, including that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal account was suspended this year for repeatedly violating Twitter’s COVID rules.

Greene’s most recent tweets include ones questioning the effectiveness of masks and making baseless claims about the safety of COVID vaccines.

Since the pandemic began, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have struggled to respond to a torrent of misinformation about the virus, its origins and the response to it.

Under the policy enacted in January 2020, Twitter prohibited false claims about COVID-19 that the platform determined could lead to real-world harms. More than 11,000 accounts were suspended for violating the rules, and nearly 100,000 pieces of content were removed from the platform, according to Twitter’s latest numbers.

Despite its rules prohibiting COVID misinformation, Twitter has struggled with enforcement. Posts making bogus claims about home remedies or vaccines could still be found, and it was difficult on Tuesday to identify exactly how the platform’s rules may have changed.

Messages left with San Francisco-based Twitter seeking more information about its policy on COVID-19 misinformation were not immediately returned Tuesday.

A search for common terms associated with COVID misinformation on Tuesday yielded lots of misleading content, but also automatic links to helpful resources about the virus as well as authoritative sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, said Tuesday that the problem of COVID-19 misinformation is far larger than one platform, and that policies prohibiting COVID misinformation weren’t the best solution anyway.

Speaking at a Knight Foundation forum Tuesday, Jha said misinformation about the virus spread for a number of reasons, including legitimate uncertainty about a deadly illness. Simply prohibiting certain kinds of content isn’t going to help people find good information, or make them feel more confident about what they’re hearing from their medical providers, he said.

“I think we all have a collective responsibility,” Jha said of combating misinformation about COVID. “The consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily.”

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Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s account on Twitter on Saturday, reversing a ban that has kept the former president off the social media site since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. Musk made the announcement in the evening after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Trump’s account should be restored.

The “yes” vote won, with 51.8%. Previously, Musk had said Twitter would establish new procedures and a “content moderation council” before making decisions to restore suspended accounts. “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.” Shortly afterward Trump’s account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them.

His followers were gone, at least initially, but he quickly began regaining them. There were no new tweets from the account as of late Saturday, however. Musk restored the account less than a month after the Tesla CEO took control of Twitter and four days after Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race. It is not clear whether Trump would actually return to Twitter. An irrepressible tweeter before he was banned, Trump has said in the past that he would not rejoin even if his account was reinstated.

He has been relying on his own, much smaller social media site, Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter. And on Saturday, during a video speech to a Republican Jewish group meeting in Las Vegas, Trump said that he was aware of Musk’s poll but that he saw “a lot of problems at Twitter.” “I hear we’re getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it,” Trump said. “It may make it, it may not make it,” he added, apparently referring to Twitter’s recent internal upheavals.

The prospect of restoring Trump’s presence to the platform follows Musk’s purchase last month of Twitter — an acquisition that has fanned widespread concern that the billionaire owner will allow purveyors of lies and misinformation to flourish on the site. Musk has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive of freewheeling speech. His efforts to reshape the site have been both swift and chaotic. Musk has fired many of the company’s 7,500 full-time workers and an untold number of contractors who are responsible for content moderation and other crucial responsibilities.

His demand that remaining employees pledge to “extremely hardcore” work triggered a wave of resignations, including hundreds of software engineers. Users have reported seeing increased spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other glitches, in the aftermath of the mass layoffs and worker exodus. Some programmers who were fired or resigned this week warned that Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash. Musk’s online survey, posted on his own Twitter account, drew more than 15 million votes in the 24 hours in which it ran.

Musk conceded that the results were hardly scientific. “Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam soon,” he tweeted Saturday morning. “Some interesting lessons to clean up future polls.” It’s not the first time he’s used Twitter polling to make business decisions. Last year he sold millions of shares of his Tesla stock after asking his followers whether he should. Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York responded to Musk’s poll on Trump by tweeting video of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

She tweeted Friday that when Trump was last on Twitter, it “was used to incite an insurrection, multiple people died, the Vice President of the United States was nearly assassinated, and hundreds were injured but I guess that’s not enough for you to answer the question. Twitter poll it is.” Trump lost his access to Twitter two days after his supporters stormed the Capitol, soon after the former president had exhorted them to “fight like hell.” Twitter dropped his account after Trump wrote a pair of tweets that the company said cast further doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the Biden presidential inauguration.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Trump was also kicked off Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta Platforms, and Snapchat. His ability to post videos to his YouTube channel was also suspended. Facebook is set to reconsider Trump’s suspension in January. Throughout his tenure as president, Trump’s use of social media posed a significant challenge to major social media platforms that sought to balance the public’s interest in hearing from public officials with worries about misinformation, bigotry, harassment and incitement of violence. But in a speech at an auto conference in May, Musk asserted that Twitter’s ban of Trump was a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”

Earlier this month, Musk, who completed the $44 billion takeover of Twitter in late October, declared that the company wouldn’t let anyone who had been kicked off the site return until Twitter had established procedures on how to do so, including forming a “content moderation council.” On Friday, Musk tweeted that the suspended Twitter accounts for the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee had been reinstated.

He added that a decision on Trump had not yet been made. He also responded “no” when someone on Twitter asked him to reinstate the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account. In a tweet Friday, the Tesla CEO described the company’s new content policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” He explained that a tweet deemed to be “negative” or to include “hate” would be allowed on the site but would be visible only to users who specifically searched for it. Such tweets also would be “demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” Musk said.

This story has been corrected to reflect that the yes vote was 51.8%, not 51.2%.

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