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During a year that seemingly shook Twitter up for good—adding an edit button and demoting legacy verified users by selling off blue checks—it’s easy to overlook how many other tech companies also threw users for a loop with some unexpected policy changes in 2022.
Many decisions to reverse policies were political. Recall that Wikipedia stopped taking cryptocurrency donations due to the environmental cost. Google started allowing political emails to bypass Gmail spam filters ahead of elections, and then, following pressure from abortion rights activists, began auto-deleting location data from sensitive medical locations. Among the most shocking shifts to some, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Facebook made a controversial call to start considering some death threats aimed at Russian military forces as acceptable “political expression”—instead of violent speech in violation of community guidelines.
Other decisions seemed to reverse course on admittedly bad business moves. Amazon stopped paying “ambassadors” to tweet about how much they loved working in lawsuit-riddled warehouses. Apple killed its controversial plan to scan all iCloud photos for child sexual abuse materials. And chasing profits that were lost through its prior adult-content ban, perhaps the greatest surprise came when Tumblr started allowing nudity again.
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