WASHINGTON: Tech giant Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday took quick action against US President Donald Trump for posts by him and his official campaign accounts in which he claimed that children are "almost immune" to Covid-19.
"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 said on Wednesday as quoted by CNN. The social media giant had removed a clip of from an interview he gave to Fox News.
Similarly, Twitter too said it had frozen the @TeamTrump account because it posted the same interview excerpt, which President Trump's account shared. A Twitter spokesperson said that the account will be frozen till the time that the tweet was removed.
Courtney Parella, a spokesperson for Trump's campaign said that Trump "was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus".
According to CNN, she further alleged that social media companies of having bias against the president further calling them "not the arbiters of truth".
According to the Washington Post in the removed video, President Trump can be heard in a phone interview saying schools should open. He goes on to say, "If you look at children, children are almost -- and I would almost say definitely -- but almost immune from this disease," and that they have stronger immune systems.
Earlier in June, Facebook removed ads run by the Trump campaign for using a Nazi symbol.
More than 240,000 children in the United States have been recorded with Covid-19, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.