For the first time, Facebook has removed a post from President Donald Trump, citing COVID-19 misinformation concerns. Conspiracy theories, misleading information, and totally false claims about COVID-19 can pop up anywhere, but they tend to spread especially quickly—and dangerously—on social media.
The deleted post featured a video from Fox News in which Trump incorrectly claims that children are “almost immune” to the new coronavirus, CNN reports.
“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 spokesperson told CNN. In fact, current evidence shows that children and teens can definitely still get—and spread—the infection, SELF explained recently. And in some instances, kids and teens still do develop serious COVID-19 symptoms, including life-threatening ones.
So no, kids are not in any way immune to the new coronavirus. However, children and teens seem to be less likely to develop serious COVID-19 illnesses than adults. But again, even without serious symptoms, they can still spread the infection.
Twitter also took action against some similar posts: The social media site temporarily blocked the Trump campaign’s Twitter account from posting until it removed a tweet with the same Fox News video. Trump’s own Twitter account had also retweeted it. The tweet “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation,” a Twitter spokesperson told CNN in a statement. “The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
Last month Facebook summarized some information about how it would be handling COVID-19 misinformation on the platform as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. One major part of the strategy would be highlighting and connecting people to reputable sources as well as removing “harmful” content, which may be inaccurate or misleading.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, social media companies have been grappling with how they should handle misinformation like this—especially when it’s coming from a high-profile account like the president of the United States.
Previously, the New York Times reported that both Facebook and Twitter decided not to remove potentially harmful Trump COVID-19 posts that featured a video in which the president wondered if ingesting or injecting bleach might help treat the new coronavirus. (It will not.) However, BBC News reports that Twitter did recently take action and suspend Donald Trump Jr. after he tweeted misinformation about COVID-19.
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