Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday, Oct. 6 took action on posts by United States President Donald Trump for violating their rules against Covid-19 misinformation.
Trump had suggested in his posts that the virus was just like the flu.
Twitter takes action
Twitter disabled retweets on the tweet from Trump on Tuesday.
It added a warning label that said the tweet broke Twitter's rules on "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19".
But Twitter said it might be in the public interest for Trump's tweet to remain accessible.
Twitter has been using labels to flag tweets with misinformation.
The company told Reuters it is currently trying to respond more quickly and more overtly to misinformation.
Facebook takes action
Facebook took a similar post down, but by then it had been shared about 26,000 times.
"We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19," a Facebook spokesman told Reuters.
The world's largest social media company has seldom taken action against posts from the Republican U.S. president.
Facebook policy exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking programme.
Facebook had only removed a Trump post for coronavirus misinformation for the first time in August.
The post included a video in which the president falsely claimed that children were "almost immune" to Covid-19.
Trump campaign responds
Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella said of the social media networks' action: "Silicon Valley and the mainstream media have consistently used their platforms to fearmonger and censor President Trump to serve their own agenda, even now during this critical moment in the fight against coronavirus."
Flu facts
During the 2019-2020 influenza season, the flu was associated with 22,000 deaths in the U.S., according to estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 210,000 people in the country have died of Covid-19, the world's highest death toll.