Twitter said on Wednesday it has banned President Donald Trump’s campaign from tweeting after its account shared a false virus claim.
The tweet, contains a video of Trump’s interview with Fox News in which he said children are “almost immune” to the virus, “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on Covid-19 misinformation,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. “The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
The account seemed to have the ability to tweet following Twitter’s statement, suggesting the campaign had followed with the order and deleted the video. Twitter confirmed to CNN that the campaign’s account can tweet again.
Just hours before, Facebook also deleted a post from President Donald Trump’s main page featuring the same interview for the same reasons.
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Courtney Parella, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said the President was “stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus,” repeating the statement she shared after Facebook’s removal.
Parella blamed Silicon Valley of being prejudice against the President and said “social media companies are not the arbiters of truth.”
Twitter and Facebook have revealed an increasing readiness to take action on posts by Trump and those close to him, leaving labels on several posts in recent weeks on topics ranging from voting to protests.
Last week, Twitter imposed a similar ban on the account of Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., after he tweeted a video featuring a doctor making misleading information claims about the virus cures and saying that people “don’t need masks” to stop the virus from spreading.
Twitter said at the time that some of the account’s functionality, including the right to tweet, would be banned for 12 hours.
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In June, Twitter put a warning sign on a tweet from Trump in which he notified if protesters tried to set up an “autonomous zone” in Washington DC they would be “met with serious force!”
Twitter said that tweet disobeyed the company’s protocol “against abusive behavior, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group.”
