Facebook, Twitter Order Removal of Trump’s Post Claiming Kids Are ‘Virtually Immune’ From COVID-19

The post in question was a video clip from a Wednesday morning phone interview Trump did with Fox News

Donald Trump
Alex Wong / Getty Images

Facebook and Twitter ordered the removal of a video shared by President Trump on Wednesday for violating the companies’ policies around COVID-19 misinformation.

“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,” a company spokesperson told TheWrap. Facebook also said this is the first time the company has taken down a post from the president due to COVID-19 misinformation.

A Twitter spokesperson told TheWrap that the video, uploaded by the Trump campaign’s @teamtrump account and then shared by Trump from his personal account, also violated Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation policies and that the account owner would need to remove the post before it could tweet again. (The video has since been taken down by the @teamtrump account.)

The video in question, which was shared on Trump’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, was a clip from a Wednesday morning phone interview Trump did with Fox News, where he called for schools to reopen, said children were “virtually immune” from COVID-19 and also repeated his claim that the virus would just “go away.”

“It doesn’t have an impact on them,” Trump said of people under the age of 18 in the clip, which was also shared on his Twitter account. “They are virtually immune from this problem and we have to open our schools.”

While COVID-19 does appear to affect young children differently than adults, children can still be infected by the virus and spread the disease.

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