Facebook and Twitter announced Wednesday that they had removed a video of President Trump shared on his Facebook page and Twitter account because it contained “false accusations” about the coronavirus. The video is an excerpt from a phone interview Trump gave to Fox News Wednesday morning in which he led schools to reopen for face-to-face learning and falsely claimed that young people were “almost immune” to the virus.
“This video includes false statements that a other people’s organization is immune to COVID-19, which is a violation of our destructive COVID disinformation policies,” said a Facebook spokesman.
A Twitter spokesperson also confirmed the video “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation,” and added that @TeamTrump, the official Twitter account for Mr. Trump’s campaign, would not be able to tweet again until they delete the tweet with the video.
In the clip, which he tweeted through Trump’s crusade and shared on Trump’s non-public Twitter account, the president reiterated his call for schools to reopen in the fall.
“If you look at young people, young people are almost, and I’d almost say, almost immune to this disease,” Trump said.
A recent in South Korea suggests that children between the ages of 0 and nine can transmit the disease to a lesser degree than adults. But they showed that 10- to 1-year-olds can transmit coronavirus at least as well as adults.
The same study also noted in its conclusion that the low rate of detection of the circle of family contacts of preschool children in South Korea may be because of the social estrangement of those periods. However, a recent report from Shenzhen, China, showed that the proportion of inflamed youth increased the epidemic from 2% to 13%, suggesting the importance of school closures. “
The national press undersecretary of Trump’s campaign, Courtney Parella, in a so-called removal of the video, “another demonstration of the blatant bias of Silicon Valley opposed to this president, where regulations are only enforced in one direction.”
“Social media corporations are the arbiters of truth,” he added.
This is not the first time that Facebook, which has been criticized in the afterlife for allowing videos and articles containing fake data to remain on its site, has deleted a video shared through Trump. In June, classified ads were removed from Trump’s crusade for showing a red triangle backwards, a symbol similar to what was once used through the Nazis to identify political prisoners such as communists, socialists, anarchists, and liberals in concentration camps.
“We’ve got rid of those posts and ads for violating our anti-organized hate policy,” a Facebook spokesman said at the time. “Our policy prohibits the use of the symbol of a prohibited hate organization to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, also recently deleted a video shared through Trump that showed a doctor wrongly claiming that the mask was not working and that the “cure” for COVID-19 hydroxychloroquine, zinc and Zithromax. This video was originally posted through the right-wing Website Breitbart.