For the first time, Facebook has removed a post by President Donald Trump due to the fact that it contained dangerous misinformation about COVID-19.
The video post on Trump’s personal page included a segment from a Fox News interview in which the president falsely claimed that children are “almost immune” to the virus, adding that “they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow.”
“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 representative said in a statement.
This is the first time Facebook has outright removed a Trump post for violating its policies, although the social media platform has previously applied labels to his misleading posts about mail-in voting. It also has removed a Trump campaign ad that contained a symbol associated with the Nazis.
Twitter also removed the video on Wednesday night after it was tweeted out by the Trump campaign, citing the fact that the video was “in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation.”
“The President was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus,” Courtney Parella, the Trump campaign’s deputy national press secretary, said in a statement. “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.”
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