On Wednesday, Twitter temporarily banned the Trump campaign's Twitter account, forcing the campaign to remove a video of the president's interview on Fox News where he said children are "almost immune" to the effects of the Wuhan coronavirus. Twitter claims the campaign's tweet violated the companies policies, but the removal appears coordinated, coming the same day that Facebook removed the president's post from their platform characterizing the president's interview as "misinformation."
"I think the schools should open," the president says in the video. "This thing is going away. It will go away like things go away and my view is that schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost – and I would say almost definitely – almost immune from this disease, so few. They've got stronger – hard to believe, and I don't know how you feel about – but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for the virus. They don't have a problem. They just don't have a problem."
The CDC has stated that the best available evidence indicates the Wuhan coronavirus poses relatively low risk to school-aged children and children appear to be at lower risk of contracting the virus when compared to adults.
Earlier reports cited a spokesperson for Twitter who said it was the president's account that was temporarily banned. But subsequent reports have walked back the claim, saying it was the Trump campaign that was blocked from tweeting until it agreed to remove the video in question.
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said the Twitter employee who announced the campaign's brief Twitter suspension was "Kamala Harris’s former press secretary." The spokesperson said that "Silicon Valley is hopelessly biased against the President."
Last week, the heads of the big tech companies, including Facebook, appeared on Capitol Hill to address concerns over anti-trust violations. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was invited but declined the House's invitation. Many believe the big-tech companies will only be ramping up their censorship of conservatives as the November election draws near.