Facebook and Twitter took action against President Trump’s official and campaign accounts respectively on Wednesday, saying the accounts broke misinformation rules in posting a video clip in which the president says children are “almost immune” from COVID-19.
Facebook removed the video clip from a Fox News interview in which the president argues that schools open, saying, “If you look at children, children are almost, and I would almost say, almost nevertheless, almost immune to this disease.”
Twitter told The Washington Post that it had prevented The Team Trump’s crusade account from tweeting until it removed a tweet with the video. The account is active again on Wednesday night.
This is not the first time Twitter has taken action against Trump to spread what it considers wrong. The reported that several of Trump’s tweets about coronavirus and mail-order voter fraud were incorrect information and even prevented his son Donald Trump Jr. from tweeting for 12 hours after sharing a video showing incorrect information about the coronavirus.
Twitter spokeswoman Liz Kelley told the Post the tweet “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation. The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
Facebook has been slower to take action and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long defended the site as a place for free speech. Bowing to pressure, Zuckerberg said in June that the company will take down posts that incite violence or attempt to suppress voting, even from political leaders. Facebook will also add labels to posts that violate its policies, including against hate speech, he said.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said: “This video states that an organization of other people is immune to COVID-19, which is a violation of our destructive COVID misinformation policies.”
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Trump crusade spokeswoman Courtney Parella told Fox News that President Trump “declared a fact that young people are less vulnerable to coronavirus.”
“Another day, demonstration of the bray Silicon Valley bias opposed to this president, where regulations are only implemented in one direction,” he added. “Social media corporations are not the arbiters of truth.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 240,000 young people in the United States have had COVID-19 and about three hundred young people have multisistmic inflammatory syndrome, a rare inflammatory disease caused by the virus. Six young men died.
Researchers found that many young people have had milder symptoms of the virus, can spread and spread coronavirus to others who would possibly fall into high-risk categories.
“They contract it and can transmit it, but they get it less and transmit it less than adults,” Theodore Ruel, director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Global Health at the University of California, San Francisco, told Post. He said that the word “immunity” is in this context, but that children, especially younger ones, are less threatened than adults.
Tweets occur at a time when schools across the country struggle to reopen schools for face-to-face learning as the coronavirus continues to spread. President Trump has continually said he supports academics’ return to in-person education, while teachers’ unions have threatened to take action if schools reopen in situations they consider unsafe.
Ruel said the reopening of youth schools can be safe, as long as proper precautions are taken, adding masking, social estrangement and the creation of a test and tactile search program.
“A well-run school will be like it’s not a grocery store,” he says. “But we want to do it for [teachers and children], and we have to recognize that it is a threat to either of us if we want to reopen schools.”