Washington: Social media giant Facebook, for the first time, has removed a post from US President Donald Trump in which he claimed that children were almost immune to COVID-19, saying it violated its policy against spreading misinformation about the novel coronavirus.
The post in question was a video clip of a Trump interview on Fox News Channel uploaded by the Trump campaign on Wednesday.
The US President claims in the clip that children are almost immune to COVID-19. While much remains unknown about the novel coronavirus, children can contract COVID-19 and are believed to be able to spread it to others, even without symptoms.
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, Andy Stone, a Facebook policy spokesperson said in a statement.
A link to the post now diverts to a page that says, This Content Isn’t Available Right Now.
It is the first time that Facebook has removed a post from Trump entirely, rather than labelling it, as it has done in the past, making it a rare instance in which it has been willing to censor the President.
In June, Facebook removed ads that the Trump campaign posted that featured a symbol Nazis used to classify political prisoners during World War II.
Twitter also removed a link to the same video clip, which the official Trump Twitter account @TeamTrump shared earlier on Wednesday. Links to the tweet now point Twitter users to a message that the tweet violated Twitter’s rules and is no longer available.
The Trump campaign accused Facebook of flagrant bias.