President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. Photo / AP
President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. Photo / AP
Twitter momentarily banned US President Donald Trump's campaign account from tweeting until an interview during which he claimed children are "virtually immune" from Covid-19 was removed.
The Fox News clip, hidden by Twitter, was shared by Team Trump – described as "the official Twitter account for the Trump Campaign".
Twitter spokeswoman Liz Kelley told The Washington Post 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," she said.
Trump made the comments in an interview aired on Wednesday morning and a segment was included in a video also removed by Facebook.
"If you look at children, children are almost – and I would almost say definitely – but almost immune from this disease. So few, they've got stronger – hard to believe, I don't know how you feel about it – but they have much stronger immune systems than we do, somehow, for this. And they don't have a problem. They just don't have a problem," Trump told Fox & Friends.
The Team Trump account on Twitter was active by Wednesday night.
A link to the Facebook post redirects users to a page that says: "This content isn't available right now."
It marks the first time Facebook has removed a post by the president for violating its coronavirus misinformation policies.
"This 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," Facebook policy spokesman Andy Stone told NBC.
Deputy national press secretary for Trump's re-election campaign, Courtney Parella, said the president "was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus".
"Another day, another display of Silicon Valley's flagrant bias against this president, where the rules are only enforced in one direction," she said in a statement.
"Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth."
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention states adults "make up most of the known cases to date" however some children and infants have been sick with Covid-19.
"Covid-19 can look different in different people," it states.
Donald Trump Jr. had his Twitter access restricted last month after he shared a video with doctors making claims about hydroxychloroquine.
According to a tally from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, there have been more than 4.8 million cases of Covid-19 recorded in the US and more than 158,000 deaths.
