Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter removed a viral video of doctors discussing the coronavirus and a potential cure on the grounds that they violated the social media platforms’ misinformation policies.
The video was shared by President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. on social media after it was originally posted by Breitbart News. The video shows people in lab coats identifying themselves as “America’s Frontline Doctors” while holding a press conference outside of the Supreme Court.
“This virus has a cure. It’s called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax,” Dr. Stella Immanuel, a West African born and trained physician, said in the video. “You don’t need masks. There is a cure.”
Immanuel said she has had a 100% success rate in treating more than 350 coronavirus patients with the hydroxychloroquine cocktail.
“So if some fake science, some person sponsored by all these fake pharma companies comes out says, ‘Oh, we’ve done studies, and they found out that it doesn’t work,’ I can tell you categorically it’s fake science,” Immanuel said.
Public officials and media pundits have been highly critical of the hydroxychloroquine’s use during the pandemic because of a dearth of evidence that it has the ability to combat or ward off the coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told ABC on Tuesday that the “overwhelming prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in coronavirus disease.”
The Food and Drug Administration rescinded emergency use authorizations for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in June. Just three months prior, the FDA had granted emergency use authorizations for the drugs to be used in hospital settings as Trump touted the drug. The FDA was then scrutinized for bowing to political pressure from the Trump administration to approve the drugs to treat the coronavirus.
There is no confirmed cure for the novel coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
Still, the video about a COVID-19 “cure” was viewed millions of times before YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter removed it.
“Tweets with the video are in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” a Twitter representative told Business Insider. “We are taking action in line with our policy.”
A Facebook representative said the social media giant also removed the video.
“Yes, we removed it for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” Andy Stone policy communications director for Facebook, said.
“We’re showing messages in News Feed to people who have reacted to, commented on, or shared harmful COVID-19-related misinformation that we have removed, connecting them to myths debunked by the WHO,” Stone said.
Also, to your previous tweet, this had nothing to do with newsworthiness and is not how our newsworthiness policy works.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) July 28, 2020
Breitbart News reported of the video, “The event, hosted by the organization America’s Frontline Doctors, a group founded by Dr. Simone Gold, a board-certified physician and attorney, and made up of medical doctors, came together to address what the group calls a ‘massive disinformation campaign’ about the coronavirus. Norman also spoke at the event.”
Other videos concerning the coronavirus have also been pulled, prompting critics of Big Tech to claim undue censorship. This includes a video of a British oncologist warning that the fear of the coronavirus “is more deadly than the virus” in May. The video has since been reinstated.
A YouTube video of two California doctors who called for an end to stay-at-home orders was also pulled in April, sparking backlash.
“Looking back, when all of this is finally over, and it will be, it’s likely we’ll see this moment — what YouTube just did — as a turning point in the way we live in this country, a sharp break with 250 years of law and custom,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said of the video being pulled. “The two doctors’ video was produced by a local television channel in California. It was, in effect, a mainstream news story.”
