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Original caption: Facebook removed Trump’s post saying COVID-19 is less lethal than the flu Source: cnBeta.COM
Facebook removed a post in which President Trump falsely claimed that the new coronavirus is less deadly than the common flu. Earlier today, Trump wrote on Facebook and Twitter: The United States has “learned to endure” the upcoming flu season.“It’s like we are learning to cope with” COVID-19. Trump falsely claimed that COVID-19 is “much less lethal to most people!” Facebook confirmed to CNN that the post was removed for violating its disinformation rules on COVID-19.
Twitter did not delete the tweet with the same information, but added a warning tag and restricted interaction with the post.
As CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan put it on Twitter, Facebook has promised to remove misinformation from COVID-19 that may “cause imminent physical harm.” This includes false statements about the “location and severity” of the COVID-19 outbreak. We do not know the exact death rate of this new type of coronavirus, but there is much evidence that it is more deadly than the flu, and even for low-risk people, its fatality is almost certainly not “much lower than the flu. “. Trump also claimed that “sometimes more than 100,000 people” die from the flu each year, and the real figure is that the number of deaths among Americans in recent years is between 24,000 and 62,000. Since March, COVID-19 has killed more than 210,000 Americans.
Trump wrote on Twitter: “Flu season is coming! Every year many people, sometimes more than 100,000, die from the flu despite the vaccine. Are we going to close our country? No, we have learned to Live with it, just as we are learning to live with Covid, it is far from fatal for most people. ” The label at the top reads: “This tweet violates the” Twitter Rules “on Spreading Misleading and Potentially Harmful Information Related to COVID -19”
Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week and spent the weekend at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center before being released from the hospital yesterday. When he announced his departure, he downplayed the severity of the virus. More generally, a recent study showed that Trump is the main driver of what disinformation experts call COVID-19 an “infodemic”: a series of questions about the impact of the virus, vaccines, the use of masks, the social distancing and false claims about the effectiveness of other measures.
