President Trump had posted a video, spreading misinformation on how children were “almost immune” to COVID-19 and Facebook censored it.
The posted clip was taken from the President’s Interview with Fox News where President Trump said: “They’ve got much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. And they don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.”
#BREAK Facebook removes post from President Trump's page for breaking its rules on Covid-19 misinformation.
The post was a clip of his interview with Fox & Friends this morning where he made claims about children and Covid-19 immunity pic.twitter.com/tPYPAVLYY8
— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) August 5, 2020
This was the first time Facebook took down a post by President Trump but did not change their stance on filtering misinformation on the platform and stuck with their defense of free expression.
According to The Guardian, a Facebook policy spokesperson 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”.
Facebook had recently faced backlash over not censoring the President’s posts and allowing him to spread misinformation and make outrageous statements on issues like the Black Lives Matter Movement too. However, Mark Zuckerberg contested the backlash by saying Facebook should not be an “arbiter of truth” of what people post online.
The post was made in order to push schools to reopen this fall and reassure parents that it was okay to send their children to school amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, evidence provided by the ‘American Academy of Pediatrics’ countered the statement made by President Trump as it stated that over 380,000 children had tested positive for the virus.
Mayo Clinic also reported: “Children of all ages can become ill with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But most kids who are infected typically don’t become as sick as adults and some might not show any symptoms at all.”
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