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By Sarah Jacoby
For the first time, Facebook deleted a message from President Donald Trump, raising erroneous data problems about COVID-19. Conspiracy theories, misleading data, and completely false claims about COVID-19 can appear anywhere, but have a tendency to spread temporarily, and dangerously, on social media.
The deleted message included a Fox News video in which Trump falsely claimed that young people were “almost immune” to the new coronavirus, CNN reports.
“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,” a Facebook spokesman told CNN. In fact, existing evidence shows that young people and teens can still contract and spread the infection, SELF explained recently. And in some cases, young people and adolescents still expand the severe symptoms of COVID-19, adding potentially fatal symptoms.
So no, young people are immune to the new coronavirus. However, young people and adolescents appear to be less likely to expand serious diseases in COVID-19 than adults. But, again, even without severe symptoms, they can still transmit the infection.
Twitter has also taken action against some similar messages: social media temporarily blocked the launch of the Trump campaign Twitter account until it deleted a tweet containing the same Fox News video. Trump’s own Twitter account had also retwed it. The tweet “is in violation of Twitter’s regulations on COVID-19 misinformation,” a Twitter spokesman told CNN in a statement. “The account owner will need to delete the Tweet before they can tweet again.”
Last month, Facebook summarized some data on how it would deal with the erroneous COVID-19 data on the platform, as well as on Instagram and WhatsApp. A key detail of the strategy would be to highlight and link others to reliable resources and remove “harmful” content, which is possibly erroneous or misleading.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, social media corporations have been wondering how they handle misinformation like this, especially when it comes from a high-level account like the President of the United States.
Previously, the New York Times reported that Facebook and Twitter did not have to remove potentially destructive COVID-19 posts from Trump containing a video in which the president questioned whether ingesting or injecting bleach could help treat the new coronavirus. (This will not be the case). However, BBC News reports that Twitter recently took action and suspended Donald Trump Jr. after tweeting fake data about COVID-19.
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