Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Twitter Suspends Trump Jr. For Spreading Claims About COVID
AP: Twitter Gives Trump Jr. A Tweet Timeout For Pandemic Misinfo
Twitter has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s son from tweeting on its site after he shared a video riddled with unsupported claims about the coronavirus Monday. Many Republicans reacted with outrage, filling social media with cries of “censorship,” after Donald Trump Jr.’s account was put on a timeout for sharing the video, which was viewed millions of times online in a matter of hours, reaching the president himself, before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube banned it. These social media platforms have zero-tolerance policies on posts that peddle potentially harmful untruths about the coronavirus. (Seitz, 7/28)
The New York Times: Misleading Coronavirus Video, Pushed By The Trumps, Spreads Online
In a video posted Monday online, a group of people calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” and wearing white medical coats spoke against the backdrop of the Supreme Court in Washington, sharing misleading claims about the virus, including that hydroxychloroquine was an effective coronavirus treatment and that masks did not slow the spread of the virus. The video did not appear to be anything special. But within six hours, President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had tweeted versions of it, and the right-wing news site Breitbart had shared it. It went viral, shared largely through Facebook groups dedicated to anti-vaccination movements and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, racking up tens of millions of views. Multiple versions of the video were uploaded to YouTube, and links were shared through Twitter. (Frenkel and Alba, 7/28)
And Donald Trump Jr. responds —
Fox News: Trump Jr. Bashes Twitter Over Suspension: 'This Never Happens To ... The Left. It Only Hurts Conservatives'
Donald Trump Jr. joined "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Tuesday to respond to the 12-hour suspension of his Twitter account after he posted a video featuring doctors endorsing the use of anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus. "I've been saying this for a long time," the president's eldest son told host Tucker Carlson. "I wrote my first book about justice and censorship coming from the big tech giants from California — as homogenous a group as you could possibly imagine. If they are censoring my account, they are censoring others and they've been trying to do this for a while." (Creitz, 7/28)
