Trump says Twitter, Facebook biased
Donald Trump accused social media companies of unfairly censoring him Thursday after Twitter and Facebook removed a video in which he suggested that children are “almost immune” from COVID-19.
Facebook removed the clip, taken from a Fox News interview, which was posted on the president’s official account, while Twitter said the Trump campaign’s account would be suspended until it took down the footage.
The moves come just three months before the U.S. presidential election and reflect the companies’ increased willingness to act on Trump’s controversial rhetoric when it breaches their rules as the campaign heats up.
In the Fox News phone interview, Trump said: “If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease.”
While children are widely believed to be at lower risk of catching COVID-19 than adults they are not immune, with close to two per cent of early cases in the U. S. being found in people aged under 18. Trump lashed out at social media companies for forcing the removal of the video, accusing them of double standards in an interview on Ohio’s WTAM 1100 radio station. Asked by the host, Geraldo Rivera, if he thought he was being unfairly censored, Trump replied: “Oh, of course.”
He added: “But they are doing ( it to) anybody on the Right, anybody, any Republican, any conservative Republican is censored.
“And look at the horrible things they say on the Left, they say things that are shocking, I mean shocking how horrible, and they’re not censored, they’re not talked about.
“They’re able to go ahead and do whatever they want to do, say whatever they want.”
A similar critique was heard from Courtney Parella the White House deputy national press secretary, who said the episode showed “Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this president.”
She said Trump “was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus.”
Trump’s Twitter account has been one of his most prominent means of communication while in office and when running for office. The president has more than 80 million followers and often writes the tweets himself. But Twitter has shown an increasing willingness to sanction the 74- year- old when he posts something that is deemed to overstep its rules.
In recent weeks, it blocked a Trump tweet that claimed postal or “mail- in” ballots would lead to election fraud and it barred his son Donald Jr. from tweeting for 12 hours over a misleading post featuring hydroxychloroquine misinformation.
Facebook has been more reticent in removing Trump’s posts, with founder Mark Zuckerberg initially criticizing Twitter for similar moves — making the latest decision to remove the content especially notable.