Facebook and Twitter Moderate Trump Campaign Accounts for Posting Covid-19 Misinformation, But YouTube Does Nothing About the Source Interview ⇥ washingtonpost.com
Heather Kelly, Washington Post:
Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday took extraordinary action against President Trump for spreading coronavirus misinformation after his official and campaign accounts broke their rules, respectively.
Facebook removed from Trump’s official account the post of a video clip from a Fox News interview in which he said children are “almost immune” from covid-19. Twitter required his Team Trump campaign account to delete a tweet with the same video, blocking it from tweeting in the interim.
In the removed video, President Trump can be heard in a phone interview saying schools should open. He goes on to say, “If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease,” and that they have stronger immune systems.
For clarity, the lower risk of serious effects in children does not mean the same thing as “almost immune”, and there are children and adults in schools. The latter is just the president being his usual thoughtless self, but the former absolutely is bad information about disease risk coming from the loudest American voice.
PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor:
This is the first time a Trump post has been removed for COVID-19 misinformation.
Facebook has also in the past removed posts by the Trump campaign which used symbols also used by Nazis.
Still on YouTube. And let’s not forget — as we too often do in this context — the original was a Fox News interview.
The YouTube video doesn’t even carry the virus advisory banner that the company has been attaching to other videos on the topic.