Twitter bans Donald Trump Jr from posting after 'misleading' Covid-19 tweet

28 July 2020, 15:12

Donald Trump's eldest son has been temporarily banned from tweeting after posting "misleading and potentially harmful information" about Covid-19.

Donald Trump Jr will now be banned from tweeting, retweeting or liking other tweets for 12 hours.

His post showed a video falsely promoted the drug hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus, which currently has an ironclad grip on the United States, with more than 2,600 new infections being confirmed every hour.

The video also showed people, who claimed to be doctors, saying "you don't need masks" and purporting studies which have concluded the drug is not effective are "fake science".

The social media platform said in a statement: "The Tweet is in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.

"The account will be locked until the account owner removes the Tweet."

Right wing news site Breitbart was the first publication to share the video in question, which subsequently went viral.

But both Twitter and Facebook have been working to remove it from their platforms under their policies to limit the spread of fake news surrounding coronavirus.

Hydroxychloroquine has been long-touted by Trump and his supporters to be useful as a preventative against Covid-19, and the President even announced he was taking a course of it in May, despite the lack of evidence that it was useful.

The World Health Organisation has also since paused trials of the drug being used to treat seriously ill patients after results showed it increased the death rate.

The US President and Twitter have been locked in a battle over the legitimacy of his tweets for a number of months, with Twitter adding a fact check to one of his posts.