Facebook has removed a post by President Donald Trump that claimed Covid-19 is "far less lethal" than the flu less than 24 hours after being discharged from hospital with the disease.
The social media giant said Mr Trump had broken its rules against dangerous misinformation by wrongly playing down the "severity" of coronavirus.
With less than a month to go until the 2020 United States election, it is the second time that Facebook has removed a post from Mr Trump’s own account for false information about the virus, and the first time that it has done so in a statement posted directly to the service.
The company previously removed a video clip posted by Mr Trump from a Fox News broadcast, in which he told an anchor that children were "virtually immune from the infection". In fact, children can catch it but tend to have milder symptoms.
It comes after days of uncertainty over the President’s health, as conflicting claims from White House officials variously suggested his case was mild and dangerously severe.
In a message posted to both Facebook and Twitter, Mr Trump claimed that "many people every year, sometimes over 100,000", die from seasonal flu.
"Are we going to close down our country?" he said. "No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!"
Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020
Those claims are contradicted by evidence from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), Mr Trump’s own public health agency. According to its statistics, Covid-19 is only significantly less deadly than flu for people below the age of 20, being about the same for those aged 20 to 49 and almost nine times worse for anyone over 50.
A different study by a group of American scientists suggested that the real difference may be starker still, finding Covid’s infection fatality rate to be higher than flu for most under-50s. Other studies suggest it can have debilitating long-term effects such as lung damage even in surviving patients.
The CDC’s highest annual estimate of flu deaths in the United States also tops out at an upper bound of 95,000 in the winter of 2017-18, when infections were not impeded by the sweeping lockdowns and social distancing practices of the coronavirus pandemic.
Twitter chose to restrict, rather than remove, Mr Trump’s words, blocking them from being retweeted without additional commentary and slapping them with a label that described them as "misleading and potentially harmful".
Separately, Twitter said it had temporarily locked Mr Trump’s account after he tweeted out the email address of a columnist for the New York Post on Monday, only unlocking it once he deleted the tweet.
President Trump tweeted the email address of a New York Post columnist on Monday. Eventually he deleted the tweet. I shared a screenshot of his tweet, because he’s the leader of the free world & everything he says is news & Twitter locked my account. They did the same to @RMac18.
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) October 6, 2020
The company also locked the accounts of two journalists who shared screenshots of the President’s claims, saying they themselves had broken its misinformation policy.
Mr Trump blasted back at both companies with a three-word tweet calling for the repeal of Section 230, the US law that protects social media companies from liability for what their users post.
REPEAL SECTION 230!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020
The President has sought to bounce back quickly from his time in hospital, in which he was given oxygen and a cocktail of experimental drugs.
In a video message on Monday he urged his supporters to "get out there", albeit "carefully", saying: Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. We’re going back, we’re going back to work."
Mr Trump’s campaigning has reinforced that message. After initially ignoring his illness, text messages sent out to his supporters heralded his return from hospital and said: "We will defeat this virus!"
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