Twitter said it had frozen the account of Team Trump for posting an excerpt of an interview with Mr Trump in which he made a statement in breach of Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation rules. The video later appeared to have been deleted from Team Trump’s account, and it has tweeted since.
The video showed a clip of a phone interview the president had given to Fox News.
In it, Mr Trump claimed children were “almost immune” from COVID-19.
He said: “If you look at children, children are almost – and I would almost say definitely – but almost immune from this disease.
“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.”
A Twitter spokesperson said last night: “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.”
A statement from the company said Team Trump would have to get rid of the offending Tweet before they could continue to publish posts.
US medical practice organisation the Mayo Clinic states: “Children of all ages can become ill with coronavirus disease 2019.
“But most kids who are infected typically don’t become as sick as adults and some might not show any symptoms at all.
READ: Donald Trump’s son suspended from Twitter over COVID-19 tweet
Courtney Parella, Deputy National Press Secretary for Team Trump, defended the video.
She said Mr Trump was “stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus,” and added: “Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth.”
It is not the first time Twitter has taken the action of freezing accounts for breaching its COVID-19 misinformation rules.
Last month the social media platform temporarily restricted the account of Mr Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., for posting a video of a medical professional talking about benefits of hydroxychloroquine – an anti-malaria drug which some have said could be used as a COVID-19 treatment.
On July 4, the World Health Organisations said its own interim trial results involving the drug “produce little or no reduction in the mortality of hospitalised COVID-19 patients when compared to standard of care.”
Despite Twitter’s action against the president’s campaign, a similar claim made by US billionaire Elon Musk – owner of SpaceX and Tesla – has not resulted in a ban.
Indeed, the Tweet, originally posted in March this year, still stands at the time of writing.
Mr Musk wrote: “Kids are essentially immune, but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable.”
Twitter claimed the tweet did not break its rules on coronavirus misinformation at the time because of the context in which it was posted.