Trump accuses social media giants of bias
President attacks Facebook and Twitter for censoring his controversial posts and not clamping down on Left
DONALD TRUMP accused social media companies of unfairly censoring him yesterday 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 US presidential election and reflect the companies’ increased willingness to act on Mr Trump’s controversial rhetoric when it breaches their rules as the campaign heats up.
In the Fox News phone interview, Mr 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 2 per cent of early cases in the US being found in people aged under 18. Mr 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, Mr 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 Mr Trump “was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus”.
Mr 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 Mr Trump’s posts, with founder Mark Zuckerberg initially criticising Twitter for similar moves − making the latest decision to remove the content especially notable. Both companies appear to be sensitive to misleading information about the coronavirus, given the threat the deadly virus poses to Americans.
Explaining the decision to remove the video, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said: “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.”
Twitter spokeman Liz Kelley said the tweet was “in violation of the Twitter rules on Covid-19 misinformation”. She added: “The account owner will be required to remove the tweet before they can tweet again.”
‘This video includes false claims which is a violation of our policies around Covid misinformation’
If you wanted to find an example of Donald Trump saying something inaccurate or misleading, you would not have to look far through the archives of his speeches, interviews and tweets. If you wanted to pick out a great big porky uttered by anyone on Facebook or Twitter, you wouldn’t have to try too hard, either.
But how odd of Facebook and Twitter to make such a meal out of a remark made by the President about Covid-19 in an interview with Fox News earlier this week: “If you look at children, children are almost – and I would almost say definitely – but almost immune from this disease.” Facebook has removed the interview from its site while Twitter suspended
Trump’s campaign page. According to Facebook it is “harmful
Covid misinformation”.
Strictly, Trump is wrong to say that children are virtually immune from the infection. According to randomised tests by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) between 26 April and 27 June, 0.29 per cent of 2 to 11-year-olds and 0.31 per cent of 12 to 19-year-olds were carrying the virus – not a lot less than the 0.42 per cent of 20 to 49-year-olds who were doing so, and more than the 0.23 per cent of over 70s. Children’s immune systems aren’t simply batting away the virus.
Yet children do seem to have a very high level of protection against suffering serious ill effects from the virus – which is presumably what Trump meant. Among 15,230 Covid deaths in New York to 13 May, for example, just nine occurred among under 18-year-olds, six of whom had underlying health conditions. In the context of the discussion he was having – arguing that there was no reason why children should not return to school – it wasn’t an unreasonable point to make, even if his language was a little careless.
There are far more misleading and outrageous comments on social media about children, schools and
Covid-19. Take this tweet, plucked from a vast reservoir of such material, posted by an anti-trump account on July 8: “Now he [Trump] is threatening schools and parents send your kids into the Covid-19 killing fields… Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist”. As of yesterday, that was still posted on Twitter: a tweet which accuses the President of sending children to the slaughter, when real evidence indicates there is a miniscule risk of any child suffering serious harm from the virus if they are returned to school. Why doesn’t that break your community standards, Twitter?
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Twitter was especially keen to make an example of Trump, to try to convince us that it is taking a strong stance against hate speech and fake news, when in reality the site remains as big a sewer as ever. Inevitably, action against the president is going to gain more publicity than action against an anonymous user with a few thousand followers. Perhaps Twitter is frightened of advertising boycotts and hopes that taking a stand against Trump will appease the activists who spend their lives campaigning against nasty big corporations.
I suspect that will be a vain hope. Even if temporarily appeased, woke activists will soon be back for more; they always are. But there is an even bigger danger for Twitter and Facebook. Their intervention against Trump’s interview blows apart any pretence they have to be mere platforms – as opposed to publishers of content.
If Twitter and Facebook stopped at removing illegal material, they might still reasonably claim the status as platforms. But they have gone further than that, and forced the removal of material which is perfectly legal but with which they disagree. They have, in effect, edited Trump’s contributions – which is what publishers do. Now that they have crossed the Rubicon, they can have no complaint if governments start treating them as publishers – for both legal and taxation purposes. They should spare us their moaning if, say, they are made to answer for libels committed by their users, or they are forced to account to a regulator for the accuracy of every statement carried on their sites.
How would Facebook and Twitter cope with the sheer volume of complaints? They may wish they had remained champions of free speech, detached from the content carried on their platforms, and left Trump to spout off all he likes.