Twitter tentatively bans Trump campaign team from tweeting over misinformation

Sylvie Claire / August 7, 2020

Twitter on Wednesday banned Donald Trump's campaign account (@TeamTrump) from continuing to tweet until he removes a video where the president says children are virtually unlikely to catch the novel coronavirus.

The tweet breaks Twitter's rules on disinformation around Covid-19. The account owner must remove the tweet before they can tweet again," said a spokesperson for the California group. The @TeamTrump account appeared to have complied with the social network's request, as it was still active Wednesday night and the video could not be found.

The clip in question showed the US president explaining in an interview with Fox News that children were "almost completely" immune, by their age, to the virus.

Facebook for its part removed the video from the Head of State's page because it "includes false claims that a certain group of people are not likely to catch Covid-19, which violates our policy on the dangerous misinformation around the disease ", justified the platform.

The president was just stating one fact: Children are less likely than adults to catch the coronavirus, "responded Courtney Parella, a spokesperson for Donald Trump's campaign.

Republicans angry at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

Here is further proof that Silicon Valley is biased against the president. Rules are only applied one way. Social networks are not the arbiter of truth, she continued.

Republicans regularly criticize Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Google) for censoring them and supporting the opposing camp, despite being very active campaigning on the media.

Donald Trump has over 80 million Twitter followers, for example.

Democrats, for their part, believe that Facebook is not moderating content strictly enough, especially that related to disinformation and hate speech.

Credit : RTBF