Facebook and Twitter have removed posts by U.S. President Donald Trump, citing the harmful spread of Covid-19 misinformation as the reason.

According to Reuters, the posts contained a video clip from an interview with Trump where he can be heard saying that children are "almost immune from this disease".

Similarly, Trump's re-election campaign's Twitter account faced repercussions for posting the same video in a tweet. According to Bloomberg, the Twitter account was briefly banned from sending new tweets.

Trump's campaign spokesman said in response in a tweet: "Silicon Valley is hopelessly biased against the President and only enforces the rules in one direction."

The Twitter employee who announced to the world why the @TeamTrump account was briefly suspended is also Kamala Harris’s former press secretary.

Silicon Valley is hopelessly biased against the President and only enforces the rules in one direction.

— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) August 6, 2020

Multiple false statements in the video

The video clip was part of a 53 minute long interview with American news show "Fox & Friends". The entire interview is still up on Fox News's YouTube channel.

Trump's comments were in response to a question about his views on schools reopening in the U.S.

Defending his opinion that schools should reopen, he said Covid-19 "will go away like things go away", and that children will be safe from the virus. He said:

"If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely, but almost immune from this disease.

So few, they have gotten stronger, hard to believe, I don't know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this."

While children are not at higher risk of Covid-19 than adults, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and adults make up most of the known cases known to date, it does not mean they are "almost immune". There have been many documented cases of infants and children contracting Covid-19.

Trump also made a number of other false claims besides this one, reported CNN.

These include claims about the number of ventilators the U.S. had before the Trump administration, voter fraud in the New York congressional primaries, and that Germany owes the U.S. and NATO payments.

Calls for social media sites to do more

In the past few months, Facebook saw more than 1,000 advertisers boycotting the social media platform, in protest of their handling of hate speech and misinformation. They include brands like Adidas, The Body Shop, and Dunkin' Doughnuts.

According to the New York Times, Facebook saw a drop in advertising spending from their top 100 advertisers.

They spent US$221.4 million (S$303.5 million) from July 1 to July 29 this year, as compared to US$251.4 million (S$344.6 million) in the same period last year.

However, Facebook might be more concerned about its reputation.

Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, the executive vice president of the public opinion analysis company RepTrak wrote: "What could really hurt Facebook is the long-term effect of its perceived reputation and the association with being viewed as a publisher of “hate speech” and other inappropriate content."

Top image credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images