Twitter temporarily suspended the Trump campaign’s account on Wednesday and only reinstated it after they took down a video of President Donald Trump claiming children are “almost immune” to COVID-19.
Twitter claimed the campaign’s tweet violated its policies. Liz Kelley, a spokesperson for Twitter, told The Washington Post that the video was “in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation,” adding that the “account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
Facebook followed suit, with spokesman Andy Stone saying on Wednesday that the “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.”
In the video, Trump said children are less susceptible to the virus. “I think the schools should open,” the president said. “This thing is going away. It will go away like things go away, and my view is that schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost – and I would say almost definitely – almost immune from this disease, so few. They’ve got stronger – hard to believe, and I don’t know how you feel about – but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for the virus. They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) late last month posted a piece headlined “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall,” which said in part:
Parents are understandably concerned about the safety of their children at school in the wake of COVID-19. The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms. Death rates among school-aged children are much lower than among adults. At the same time, the harms attributed to closed schools on the social, emotional, and behavioral health, economic well-being, and academic achievement of children, in both the short- and long-term, are well-known and significant.
Further, the lack of in-person educational options disproportionately harms low-income and minority children and those living with disabilities. These students are far less likely to have access to private instruction and care and far more likely to rely on key school-supported resources like food programs, special education services, counseling, and after-school programs to meet basic developmental needs.
The CDC went on to say that “the best available evidence indicates that COVID-19 poses relatively low risks to school-aged children.”
“Children appear to be at lower risk for contracting COVID-19 compared to adults. To put this in perspective, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of July 17, 2020, the United States reported that children and adolescents under 18 years old account for under 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths.“
The center also said “scientific studies suggest that COVID-19 transmission among children in schools may be low.”
The Washington Post initially said Trump’s personal account was banned from Twitter before issuing a correction.
“Breaking: Twitter said it will require President Trump to remove a post containing coronavirus misinformation, banning him from tweeting until he does so,” the Post began its report in bold text, Fox News reported. “Twitter hid the post and said he will not be able to tweet from his account until he deletes it, although he can appeal the decision.”
“The paper ultimately issued a correction, writing at the bottom of its report, ‘Twitter penalized Team Trump, the president’s campaign account. An earlier version of this article said that Twitter penalized President Trump’s account,'” Fox wrote.
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