Twitter has disabled some sharing options of US President’s tweet on Sunday after he made the claims that he’s now immune to the coronavirus as the social media company stated this to being against its community guidelines and misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the said tweet, the president said he had “A total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday. That means I can’t get it (immune) and can’t give it. Very nice to know!!”
The tweet is still up on his account but when clicked, there comes a warning which let user know that the information about the COVID-19 they’re seeing might not be accurate but attempts to share the tweet bring up an alert that reads “We try to prevent a Tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people.” The labeled tweet is still able to be quote-tweeted, however.
The assertion about his immunity to the disease since contracting it is what got his tweet flagged as there hasn’t been any scientific documented reports about how long it will take infected patients to becoming immune to the virus or being re-infected when exposed to the coronavirus in the future.
There was a reported case of a man in Nevada had COVID-19 in March then recovered in April only to fall ill again in May. The first documented case of a coronavirus reinfection occurred in Hong Kong, where the patient showed no symptoms the second time around.
Also the CDC official website doesn’t have enough information about about reinfections, but says “a person who has had and recovered from COVID-19 may have low levels of virus in their bodies for up to 3 months after diagnosis,” and that the science “does not imply a person is immune to reinfection” from the virus.
Furthermore, Twitter spokesperson had made it known that the platform has disabled sharing on a tweet by the president due to incorrect information and also stated that its updated policies last month would label or remove tweets which contains false information about election rigging and results and also stated that it would label posts from candidates prematurely declaring victory.
The update further tightened the rules around spreading of misinformation on the social media platform and further encouraged its users to quote-tweet and “add their commentary” to tweet before retweeting someone.
The update also included plans to flag or remove tweets meant to incite interference in the election or election results, and tweets from political figures with more than 100,000 followers — which includes President Trump — labeled as “misleading” are now more difficult to access.
This isn’t the first of Trump’s tweet that will be labelled on the platform for misinformation. The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment Sunday.