Trump Against Violates Facebook And Twitter Rules Regarding COVID-19 Claims

US President Donald Trump (doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - After previously making a scene in the social media scene if he was infected with COVID-19, now the President of the United States (US) Donald Trump is again facing reprimands from social media networks Facebook and Twitter.

How not, Trump posted claiming that "COVID-19 is much more deadly than the flu." Initially he said this on Twitter, soon he also uploaded it to Facebook.

Because it was judged to violate the policies of the social media platform, Facebook immediately deleted Trump's post stating that they "(removed) misinformation about the severity of COVID-19, and have now deleted this post."

Likewise, Twitter immediately hid the tweet and provided a warning label saying it violated platform rules by spreading false or dangerous information about COVID-19.

"We are placing a public interest notice in this Tweet for violating our Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy by making misleading health claims about COVID-19," said a Twitter spokesman as quoted by Tech Crunch, Wednesday, October 7.

While deleting one of the president's posts is rare, it isn't a first for Facebook. In August, Facebook deleted a video Trump shared claiming that children are immune to COVID-19. The video clip was originally shown on Fox News.

Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal !!!

- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the post has reached a large audience with 59,000 retweets and 186,000 likes. Twitter cannot possibly delete it, it only labels the tweet with a limited warning, which means it can no longer be replied to, retweeted or like.

As is well known, Facebook and Twitter have both made new policies to deal with the spread of misinformation related to the pandemic earlier this year.

At the start of the pandemic, the false claim that COVID was comparable to the flu was a common statement from Trump and his allies, who wanted to underestimate the severity of the virus. But after months of the virus spreading across US society, the claim that COVID-19 is like the flu is an even more glaring lie than anything else.