Big Tech is getting more aggressive than ever in its censorship of the president.
Facebook and Twitter removed a video in which President Donald Trump claimed that children are at little risk from the coronavirus, as The Hill reported.
Facebook removes Trump post
In recent months, Big Tech companies have taken increasingly more drastic steps to control the president’s content, as Trump continues to face accusations of spreading lies about the coronavirus and mail-in voting.
Trump has said that greater access to testing is behind an increase in total COVID-19 cases and that it is safe for children to go back to school, contradicting a much darker picture painted by critics.
On Wednesday, Facebook removed a clip of a Fox and Friends interview that Trump shared on his official account, in which he expressed amazement at how children are almost “almost immune” to the virus and “just don’t have a problem.”
“My view is that schools should be open,” Trump said. “If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease.”
Facebook removed the post and said, “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.”
Twitter joins in
As the BBC noted, Twitter went even further and suspended his Team Trump campaign account, saying an identical post was “in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation.”
“The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again,” Twitter said, according to the BBC.
These are just the latest examples of Big Tech companies working with skewed “fact checkers” to summarily dismiss challenging claims. As Fox News reported, In May, Twitter censored Trump for the first time for suggesting that widespread use of mail-in ballots would result in fraud: a provocative, but not by any means implausible, notion.
While Trump obviously has a tendency to exaggerate, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand the point he was making this time, namely that children are, comparatively speaking, at a lower risk from the virus. That’s not even a controversial claim, but it’s not surprising that obtuse, literal-minded “fact checkers” missed the point.
But that was actually on purpose, wasn’t it?
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