Elon Musk has declared that Twitter will follow the scientific method, which requires hypotheses to be tested and revised in accordance with new information.
Twitter’s new owner announced via tweet on Wednesday, “New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science.”
Some Twitter users questioned his meaning, prompting Musk to indicate that he was referring to the scientific method.
Musk then turned his attention to Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Some lawmakers repeatedly challenged Fauci’s stance on mask mandates and other aspects of pandemic policy, prompting the immunologist to cast his critics as anti-science.
“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci claimed to MSNBC last summer.
“All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people,” he continued.
Twitter user Gad Saad tweeted satirically in response to Musk’s Wednesday announcement, “The science is anything that His Eminence Lord Fauci says it is. His Excellency is science.”
“Anyone who says that questioning them is questioning science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist,” Musk tweeted in response to Saad.
Earlier in December, Musk joked about the prosecution of Fauci for alleged misconduct in establishing pandemic policy, tweeting, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
Wednesday’s announcement was met with mixed reactions, with some users attacking Musk and others praising his stance.
Writer Wajahat Ali described Musk’s statement as “[s]omething a really dumb person would tweet.”
Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist with the University of Illinois-Chicago, asked whether Musk meant that Twitter “won’t allow people to spread misinformation who have zero data to back up their conspiratorial claims? and you’ll bring back your moderation policy?”
Meanwhile, over half a million Twitter users had indicated by noon Thursday that they agreed with Musk’s new approach.
NASA Earth cartography and data visualization lead Joshua Stevens tweeted his belief that Musk’s announcement was “fair and reasonable.”
“There is no such thing as science without debate,” Stevens asserted. “The whole point of replicating results is that it is not sufficient to assume any study final and unflawed. There are always questions.”
