Social media giants take down Trump’s COVID-19 posts over misinformation
Donald Trump shared an interview where he claimed children are “almost immune” to the coronavirus, but the post has been flagged as misinformation
The social media giants have pulled down a post by the US president, Donald Trump, after flagging it as misinformation about the COVID-19 disease.
Trump posted an interview with Fox in which he made comments about the fast-spreading disease.
He claimed that children are “almost immune” to the coronavirus, in a video clip that has since been taken down. Facebook maintained that Trump’s statement violated its rules against sharing misinformation about the pandemic.
“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19, which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation,” a Facebook spokesman told Reuters.
Twitter, YouTube also pull it down
The footage of Trump’s interview on Fox & Friends was also shared across Twitter and YouTube by his campaign team.
However, both platforms immediately joined Facebook in taking down the clip for breaking misinformation rules.
A Twitter spokesman said the firm has hidden the post on the Trump campaign’s @TeamTrump account.
The @TeamTrump account owner would now be required to remove the tweet before they could tweet again, the spokesperson said.
A YouTube spokesman said Trump’s video had been taken off its platform because it violated the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Interestingly, however, the original interview remains available on the Fox News YouTube page.
Team Trump slams social media giants
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign team has hit out at the social media companies over their decision to pull down the pesident’s posts.
A spokeswoman with the campaign, Courtney Parella, accused Facebook, YouTube and Twitter of being biased against Trump.
“Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth,” she fumed, as quoted by Reuters.
President Trump, however, shrugged off the incident and repeated his claims later at the White House.
He said, “Children handle it very well. If you look at the numbers, in terms of mortality, fatalities … for children under a certain age … their immune systems are very, very strong and very powerful.
“They seem to be able to handle it very well and that’s according to every statistical claim.”
E A Alanore
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