Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter temporarily in ‘lockout’ for coronavirus misinformation
Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son, is facing a temporary “lockout” on Twitter after he retweeted a video sharing misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.
The account will be frozen for 12 hours and Trump Jr. won’t be able to post new messages, retweet other posts or like posts. He can still use Twitter’s direct messages to contact other people who follow him.
“This account has not been permanently suspended. Per the screenshot, the Tweet requires deletion because it violates our rules (sharing misinformation on COVID-19), and the account will have limited functionality for 12 hours,” Twitter wrote in a tweet.
The social media company also said tweets associated with the video are “in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” and that they are taking action against them, a Twitter representative told Business Insider.
What was said in the video?
Trump and Trump Jr. retweeted a Breitbart video with claims that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID-19, Business Insider reported. The video has been taken down from YouTube, Twitter and Facebook after getting more than 14 million views on Facebook.
The video captures a news conference held in front of a handful of people in Washington, D.C., by the group America’s Frontline Doctors, according to Breitbart, and was sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots, a conservative American political organization.
The event included GOP U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina.
On Tuesday afternoon, the America’s Frontline Doctors’ website “expired.”
The video features a primary care physician, who claims to be a doctor in Houston, saying, “You don’t need masks. There is a cure.”
The woman said she has treated over 350 coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, zinc and zithromax, and “they are all well; we have not lost one.” She claims the three drugs are the cure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic. She also said she has put herself, her staff and other doctors on hydroxychloroquine “for prevention.”
However, the Food and Drug Administration has cautioned against using hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 and withdrew emergency use authorization for the drug after several studies pointed out that it does not help coronavirus patients, and might cause more harm than good — despite the retraction of one major study on the drug for data inconsistencies.
“I’m a real doctor,” the woman says. “I tell all you doctors that are sitting down watching Americans die, you’re like the good Nazi, the good Germans that watch Jews get killed and don’t speak up.”
“If this is the hill where I get nailed on, I will get nailed on it, I don’t care,” the woman says in the video. “You can report me to the board, you can kill me, you can do whatever, but I’m not going to let Americans die.”
Meanwhile, other participants stood laughing in the background as the woman mocked American neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, for saying the drug doesn’t work.
Others in the video claimed that “many thousands of physicians [have] been silenced,” that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are “the same,” and the coronavirus “is not that novel” although the virus has never been seen in humans before.
“We are not held down by the virus as much as we are being held down by the spider web of fear,” Dr. Simone Gold, who hosted the event and founded the group America’s Frontline Doctors, said in the video. “That spider web is all around us and it’s constricting us and draining the lifeblood of the American people, American society and American economy.”
More than 4.3 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed and more than 148,000 people have died in the U.S. as of July 28, according to Johns Hopkins University.
This story was originally published July 28, 2020 at 9:11 AM with the headline "Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter temporarily in ‘lockout’ for coronavirus misinformation."