Twitter has once again, taken a hit at President Donald Trump, as they take down a video of Trump spreading COVID-19 misinformation. He had said in the video, that children are immune to COVID-19, and Twitter wasted no time to suspend the ‘Team Trump’ account for violating the policy against posting COVID-19 misinformation.
Twitter took down the video of COVID-19 misinformation, posted by Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and tweeted by the president. The company said it had suspended the @TeamTrump account preventing it from tweeting, retweeting or liking posts, pending removal of the violating tweet.
The tweet “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation,” a Twitter spokeswoman said. “The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
In this case, the account owner is @TeamTrump, which originally posted the video.
Trump had said, “My view is the schools should open. This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away. And my view is that schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost and I would almost say, definitely but almost immune from this disease. So few, they’ve got stronger, hard to believe, I don’t know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this…
They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem… They are virtually immune from this problem.”
It is untrue that children are “almost immune” or “virtually immune” to COVD-19, according to medical experts. Kids have tended to become less sick when infected with coronavirus, but even if they show no symptoms they may still transmit the virus to others.
Facebook also did the same thing, removing the COVID-19 misinformation from their page. It will be the first time the social giant had taken action to remove content posted by the president based on its coronavirus-misinformation policy.
White House spokeswoman Courtney Parella said in a statement, “The president was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus,” although what Trump actually said — that kids are “virtually immune” or “almost immune” to the virus — is false. The rep also said, “Another day, another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this president, where the rules are only enforced in one direction. Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth.”
“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 rep said in a statement.