After Facebook and Instagram, it's YouTube's turn to act against the disinformation emitted from the top of the Brazilian state.
The video platform suspended President Jair Bolsonaro's channel activities for a week on Monday, after removing a video in which he mentioned false information linking the Covid vaccine to AIDS.
"We removed a video from Jair Bolsonaro's channel for violating our medical disinformation policies on Covid-19 by claiming that vaccines do not reduce the risk of contracting the disease and that they cause other infectious diseases" YouTube said in a statement.
This is the second time that the president has violated the platform's “community standards”.
This time, he won't be able to post any new videos or do live broadcasts for the next seven days, according to the platform's rules.
The rest of his videos on the channel, where he has 3.5 million subscribers, can however be viewed on YouTube.
Social networks Facebook and Instagram, which belong to the same group, deleted the video on Monday for the same reason.
A denial by the British government
In his weekly live video last Thursday, posted simultaneously across multiple platforms, Jair Bolsonaro mentioned a rumor that official UK government reports "suggest" that fully vaccinated people are developing the AIDS virus "much faster than expected."
“I recommend you read the news.
I'm not going to read them here because I might have problems with my live, ”he added.
The information was denied by the British government.
The Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases for its part assured Saturday in a statement that "no relationship is known between any vaccine against Covid-19 and the development of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome" (AIDS).
First sanctions from Facebook
The far-right leader has not reacted to the blocking of his YouTube channel.
Already last March, Facebook had withdrawn one of his videos in which he criticized preventive measures and anti-Covid vaccines, encouraged crowds, at a time when some 2,500 people were dying every day from the coronavirus in Brazil.
Read also Covid-19: why is mortality soaring in Brazil?
In general, Jair Bolsonaro is regularly accused of spreading false news.
In August, the Federal Supreme Court decided to investigate him for crimes of "slander" and "incitement to crime", in particular because of his questioning of the electronic voting system in Brazil.
