Facebook and Twitter took punitive action on Tuesday against remarks by Donald Trump assuring that the seasonal flu was killing more people than the Covid-19 in some cases, establishing a game of cat and mouse now routine less than one US presidential month.
Read also: Twitter hides a photo of Barack Obama: we cannot trust the AI
“The seasonal flu is coming!”
Exclaimed the president on his first wake-up call in the White House, after three days of hospitalization to seek treatment for the disease which has already killed more than 200,000 people in the United States. United.
“Are we going to close our country?
No, we've learned to live with it, the same way we learn to live with Covid, which in most people is much less fatal! ”
, he added, ignoring the numbers.
Facebook has completely removed this post.
“We are removing incorrect information on the severity of Covid-19 and we have removed this post,”
said a spokesperson for the social media giant.
Covid-19 is expected to be the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020.
Twitter, for its part, simply masked the tweet with a message explaining that it was breaking network rules on
"misleading and potentially dangerous information related to Covid-19"
.
It remains readable by clicking on it, because
"Twitter has decided it may be in the public interest to keep the tweet accessible
.
"
Several "pinned" messages
The two networks have already pinned several messages from the tenant of the White House or advertisements from his campaign for a few months.
They can
“tag”
messages by adding warnings or links to them, hide them or simply remove them.
They have so far intervened mainly for problems of disinformation, when the president's messages threaten, according to their moderators, the health of the people or the democratic process.
Donald Trump, for example, made many comments that could discourage voters from voting by mail.
Facebook, which has long advocated greater tolerance for the voices of politicians and candidates in the name of voters' right to make up their own minds, has finally toughened its rules in the face of outrage from society American civilian.
The Head of State, for his part, accuses digital platforms of censorship and calls for a change in the law which governs their room for maneuver in terms of moderation of content.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/PLLMQZDHVVEMHBHGHSS4ZY4A2E.jpg)
