Facebook and Twitter took action on posts from U.S. President Donald Trump for contravening their rules against coronavirus misinformation by suggesting that Covid-19 was just like the flu.
Facebook took the post down but till then it was shared about 26,000 times, the company’s metric tool CrowdTangle report showed.
“We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19,” a company spokesman told.
The world’s largest social media giant, Facebook, has reported very rare instances where it has removed content posted by politicians and diplomats.
Twitter disabled retweets on a similar tweet from Trump on Tuesday and added a warning label that said it broke its rules on “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19” but that it might be in the public interest for it to remain accessible.
During the 2019-2020 influenza season, the flu was associated with 22,000 deaths in the United States, according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Since the first case of the coronavirus was recorded in the United States at the beginning of this year, more than 210,000 people in the country have died of the disease caused by the virus, the world’s highest death toll.
Trump told Americans “to get out there” and not be afraid of Covid-19 as he returned to the White House after a three-night stay in a military hospital outside Washington where he had his treatment for covid-19.
“Silicon Valley and the mainstream media have consistently used their platforms to fearmonger and censor President Trump to serve their own agenda, even now during this critical moment in the fight against coronavirus,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella said.
Twitter has made it clear that it would not let any misleading information surface on its platform from anyone including the president.
Facebook ,meanwhile, removed a post by the US president which included misleading information related to the coronavirus misinformation for the first time in August. The post featured a video wherein Trump made blatant claims that children were “almost immune” to Covid-19.