A video posted on U.S. President Donald Trump’s Facebook page was removed through the social media giant because it violated the company’s COVID-19 disinformation policies.
The video showed footage from a Fox News interview, where Trump was pushing for the reopening of schools. During the interview, he said children are “virtually immune” to coronavirus.
“If you look at young people, young people are almost, and I would almost say, but almost immune to this disease. So few, they’ve become more powerful, hard to believe, and I don’t know how you feel about it, but they have a much more powerful immune formula than us for that,” the president said in the interview.
“They just don’t have a problem.”
The video, which will no longer be on Facebook, is still available on Trump’s Twitter account, where it has recorded more than 916,000 views.
“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,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement issued to sister site CNET.
The Facebook network criteria describe what is and is not allowed on Facebook, and have been developed on the basis of feedback from its “network” and qualified recommendations in spaces such as technology, public protection and human rights.
“We need others to communicate braking about the problems they fear, even if some may disagree or place them as unacceptable,” Facebook wrote.
“In some cases, we allow content that would otherwise be contrary to our Community criteria, if it is of journalistic interest and of public interest. We do this only after we have weighed the price of the public interest as opposed to the threat of harm and we resort to foreign human rights. Criteria for making those judgments.”
The social network said the consequences of violating its range of criteria depend on the severity of the violation and the person’s history on the platform.
“For example, we may notify someone of a first violation, but if they continue to violate our policies, we may limit their ability to post on Facebook or disable their profile,” the criteria note states. “We can also inform the police when there is a real threat of physical harm or a direct threat to public safety.”
Although the video can still be obtained through Trump’s Twitter account, his crusade account was asked to delete the message. According to a Washington Post report, Twitter said it would require the account to delete the post, in a different way, the account will be banned from tweeting until it does, because the tweet is “in violation of Twitter’s COVID-19 disinformation regulations.” “
In the past, Twitter had been accused through Trump of “interfering” with the 2020 presidential election, after the company slapped fact-checking links in their tweets that claimed that postal voting would lead to a “fraudulent election.”
Updated at 11:06 a.m. AEST Wednesday, August 6, 2020: Trump’s cross account ban was added until his copy of the video is removed.
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