Trump Campaign Account Barred From Tweeting Until It Deletes False COVID-19 Claim

Twitter announced Wednesday that US President Donald Trump’s  campaign account Team Trump was barred from tweeting unless it took down a post that violated the platform’s policies on misinformation about the coronavirus. Facebook also removed a post containing the same claim.

The post in question included a clip from a “Fox & Friends” interview with the president that aired earlier Wednesday, during which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19.

A Twitter spokesperson told HuffPost the tweet “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation. The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”

In the interim, the post was hidden, per Twitter’s enforcement rules . The Trump campaign did not clarify whether it finally removed the tweet, but did appear to be tweeting again from that account later on.

Trump also appeared to share a link to the tweet from the campaign account on his main page.

Trump campaign spokesperson Courtney Parella told HuffPost in a statement: “Another day, another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this President, where the rules are only enforced in one direction. Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth. The President was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus.”

In the interview, Trump was pushing for schools to reopen nationwide. He said: “If you look at children, children are almost and I would almost say definitely almost immune from this disease.”

Children can absolutely be infected with the virus, though they are significantly less likely to become severely ill from it. They can also still transmit the virus to others.

Earlier, a post on Trump’s Facebook account containing the same video was also taken down, marking the first time Facebook has removed a post from Trump’s account for violating misinformation policies. 

“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 spokesperson Andy Stone told HuffPost in a statement.