社交媒体共同-19镇压正在审查媒体

I was stunned when a Twitter executive advised us to take down articles about COVID-19 and another article about access to abortions if we wanted to promote our news on the site.

“I would recommend following the recommendations to remove COVID-19 and abortion content on the landing pages linked from the bio and promoted tweets,” he wrote in an email.

For the avoidance of doubt, “landing pages linked from the bio” means our news homepage.

这堕胎文章he is referring to was about a研究论文published in这Lancet，这表明在制定限制时堕胎率飙升。我们的COVID-19覆盖范围基于同行评审的研究。

对于像这样的小出版商scidev.net，，，，social media is one of the main ways we reach our audience. Last year, social media provided 80 per cent of our entire audience reach of 215 million. In the first half of this year, the COVID-19 crackdown meant the proportion from social media fell to less than half.

Twitter allows news publishers to登记为了豁免这些限制，但前提是您每月至少有300万唯一的访问者 - 对于我们规模的专业新闻媒体来说，这是不可能的任务，这仅在一年之内才能获得该数字。

When asked for his response to this story, the Twitter executive said: “I'd like to reassure you that our commitment to freedom of expression is deeply embedded into our DNA as a company.”

He added that while the articles weren’t in violation of the company’s “organic” content policy, “we do have certain restrictions in place from our advertising policies which apply solely to our paid advertising solutions”.

As promoted posts are the main way for publishers to reach their audiences, these restrictions amount to a crackdown by social media firms on science news from small publishers, and in particular news about COVID-19.

Our readers are mostly based in developing countries, and this crackdown means people are prevented from learning about COVID-19 at a time of pandemic – when the need for accurate science news is greater than ever.

健康的社会

昨天，世界卫生组织和联合国说，与错误信息和虚假新闻作斗争的最佳方法是确保获得基于证据的科学。联合国直接呼吁社交媒体平台与“自由，独立和多元的新闻”合作，以帮助建立健康的社会。

他说：“要与我们需要信任和团结的大流行作斗争……我们必须联合起来战斗并促进基于科学的公共卫生建议。”

If you readscidev.netregularly, you’ll know that we take great pride in being a trustworthy publisher. All the science we cover is peer reviewed or from reputable sources, and every article contains a comment from a researcher who was not involved in the study.

We’re even part of信任项目– a coalition of news organisations including这Economist， 这英国广播公司and天空新闻- 哪些以机器可读格式发布了所有政策，因此Facebook和Twitter可以检查它们。我们的更正，多样性和匿名政策都是明确提出在我们的网站上。

值得称赞的是，社交媒体网站正在打击虚假新闻和误导性内容，但是他们需要确保可靠的新闻来源仍然可以表达自己的声音。这比现在更重要，因为人们需要访问Covid-19-19的大流行信息。