Facebook and Twitter axe ‘harmful’ Trump post

Twitter and Facebook removed a post by US President Donald Trump for breaching their policies against spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

Facebook removed a post containing a video from Mr Trump’s official account on Wednesday for including “false claims that a group of people is immune from Covid-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful Covid misinformation”.

Hours later, Twitter temporarily blocked his Team Trump campaign account from tweeting until it removed a post with a link to the same Fox News video, which shows Mr Trump claiming children are “virtually immune” to the virus.

The video was retweeted by Mr Trump’s account.

Twitter said the tweet broke its rules against Covid-19 misinformation.

“The account owner will be required to remove the tweet before they can tweet again,” Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said.

Twitter has generally been quicker than Facebook in recent months to label posts from Mr Trump that break its policies against misinformation and abuse.

This is not the first time Facebook has removed a post from Mr Trump, Facebook said, but it is the first time it has done so because it was spreading misinformation about the virus. The company has also labelled his posts.

While some studies suggest that children are less likely to become infected with the virus than adults and more likely to have only mild symptoms, scientific research has not proved this claim.

A US study involving 2,500 children published in April found that about one in five infected children were admitted to hospital versus one in three adults; three children died.

The study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention lacks complete data on all of the cases, but it also suggests that many infected children display no symptoms, which could allow them to unknowingly spread the virus.