Twitter, Facebook Gun Down Trump's Post On Children Being Almost Immune To COVID-19

President Trump has had a long-standing history of spreading misinformation about the novel coronavirus. On Wednesday, leading social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook decided to show their disapproval of the U.S. president’s gnawing ignorance and took down a recent post by Trump, suggesting that it violated the platforms’ rules of circulating misinformation about the highly contagious virus.

While the post was taken down on social media, Trump stood by his views and reiterated that the virus had little impact on children during a recent press briefing at the White House.

“Children handle it very well,” said Trump to reporters. “If you look at the numbers, in terms of mortality, fatalities ... for children under a certain age ... their immune systems are very very strong and very powerful. They seem to be able to handle it very well and that’s according to every statistical claim,” he added.

The stance found no place on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “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,” said a Facebook spokesman, while elucidating the reasoning behind the decision to remove the post that comprised a video clip -- which had Trump claim, in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that children were “almost immune” to the virus.

This is a first of sorts, as Facebook has never taken down any inflammatory post by the president in the past.

Twitter followed in on Facebook’s footsteps – a tweet comprising the video, which was posted by the Trump campaign’s @TeamTrump account and also shared by the president was also later hidden by Twitter Inc TWTR.R on the grounds of flouting its COVID-19 misinformation rules.

The networking platform however retained clips of Trump, where he urged scientists to investigate using light or disinfectant on patients. The platform argued that the aforementioned statement suggested a wish for treatment over call for action.

Despite the tweet having drawn forth major flak; the Trump campaign slammed the social media platforms for allegedly being unfair towards the president and his views. “Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth,” said Courtney Parella, a spokeswoman with the campaign, hinting at the bias meted out to Trump.

Albeit minuscule, children have been susceptible to the disease. As per the data released by the World Health Organization that studied six million infections between Feb. 24 and July 12; children between the ages of 5 to 14 years made for a minuscule 4.6% out of the lot.