The Washington Post on Wednesday got it all wrong.
“Breaking: Twitter said it will require President Trump to remove a post containing coronavirus misinformation, banning him from tweeting until he does so,” the Post began, putting the breathless report in bold text. “Twitter hid the post and said he will not be able to tweet from his account until he deletes it, although he can appeal the decision.”
The Post also shared a quote from a Twitter spokesman that “appeared to allude to the president instead of his campaign, saying the tweet 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,'” Fox New reported.
The post was quickly shared on Twitter by several Washington Post reporters.
But it was all wrong. It wasn’t President Trump, it was his re-election campaign.
The Post was forced to issue a correction, noting that, “Twitter penalized Team Trump, the president’s campaign account. An earlier version of this article said that Twitter penalized President Trump’s account.”
Oops.
“Another day, another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this President, where the rules are only enforced in one direction,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella told Fox News. “Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth.”
Twitter on Wednesday temporarily banned the Trump campaign’s account for posting a video of the president’s interview on Fox News in which he said children are “almost immune” to the effects of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Liz Kelley, a spokesperson for Twitter, told The Post that the video was “is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation,” adding that the “account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
Facebook also deleted the video, with spokesman Andy Stone saying on Wednesday that the “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.”
In the video, Trump said children are less susceptible to the virus. “I think the schools should open,” the president said. “This thing is going away. It will go away like things go away and my view is that schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost – and I would say almost definitely – almost immune from this disease, so few. They’ve got stronger – hard to believe, and I don’t know how you feel about – but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for the virus. They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) late last month posted a piece headlined “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall.”
Parents are understandably concerned about the safety of their children at school in the wake of COVID-19. The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms, Death rates among school-aged children are much lower than among adults. At the same time, the harms attributed to closed schools on the social, emotional, and behavioral health, economic well-being, and academic achievement of children, in both the short- and long-term, are well-known and significant.
Further, the lack of in-person educational options disproportionately harms low-income and minority children and those living with disabilities. These students are far less likely to have access to private instruction and care and far more likely to rely on key school-supported resources like food programs, special education services, counseling, and after-school programs to meet basic developmental needs.
The CDC went on to say that “the best available evidence indicates that COVID-19 poses relatively low risks to school-aged children.”
