Twitter announced today that they restricted President Donald Trump’s campaign account from being able to tweet, muzzling their message to over 2 million followers after the social media giant said @TeamTrump shared a video containing “false information about Covid-19.”
The offending Tweet which kicked off the kneecapping of the campaign was a video clip of Trump’s recent Fox News interview where he said children are “almost immune” to the virus. According to a Twitter Spokesperson, this was deemed to be “in violation of the Twitter Rules on Covid-19 misinformation” and that “the account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again.”
Courtney Parella, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said the President was “stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus.” The stats do bear this out. According to the CDC, out of the 150,000 deaths in the United States, only 45 are from children under the age of 14, and even then it is unknown what comorbidities may have been present which contributed to the deaths.
It’s not the first time that Twitter has done The Donald dirty. Last week they imposed similar restrictions on his son, Don Trump Jr., after he posted what they considered a distasteful and erroneous message about coronavirus cures and best practices for health and safety. Twitter also affixed a warning label/ trigger to one of his missives after the President threatened that any protesters trying to set up CHAZ II “autonomous zones” in DC would be met with “serious force.”
Earlier reports indicated that @realDonaldTrump was constrained until they deleted the posts when it was in fact his official campaign feed @TeamTrump that was muted.
