SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, Fb’s chief govt, mentioned in March that selling bleach as a treatment for the coronavirus was “misinformation tha
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, Fb’s chief govt, mentioned in March that selling bleach as a treatment for the coronavirus was “misinformation that has imminent threat of hazard” and that such messages would instantly be faraway from the social community.
President Trump has now put Mr. Zuckerberg’s feedback to the check. At a White Home briefing final week, Mr. Trump suggested that disinfectants and ultraviolet light were possible treatments for the virus. His remarks immediately found their way onto Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites, and people rushed to defend the president’s statements as well as mock them.
But Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have declined to remove Mr. Trump’s statements posted online in video clips and transcriptions of the briefing, saying he did not specifically direct people to pursue the unproven treatments. That has led to a mushrooming of other posts, videos and comments about false virus cures with UV lights and disinfectants that the companies have largely left up.
A New York Times analysis found 768 Facebook groups, 277 Facebook pages, nine Instagram accounts and thousands of tweets pushing UV light therapies that were posted after Mr. Trump’s comments and that remained on the sites as of Wednesday. More than 5,000 other posts, videos and comments promoting disinfectants as a virus cure were also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube this week. Only a few of the posts have been taken down.
The social media companies have always trod delicately when it comes to President Trump. Yet their inaction on posts echoing his remarks on UV lights and disinfectants stands out because the companies have said for weeks that they would not permit false information about the coronavirus to proliferate.
Apart from Mr. Zuckerberg’s saying Facebook would take a stand, Twitter announced in March that it might delete virus tweets “that would probably trigger hurt.” YouTube has repeatedly mentioned it removes movies that present medically unsubstantiated coronavirus remedies. And the entire corporations have mentioned they might promote virus info from authoritative well being sources just like the World Well being Group.
On Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg reiterated that Fb wouldn’t tolerate virus falsehoods. In an investor call, he cited the example of “inhaling water” to cure the coronavirus as dangerous misinformation that the social network would remove.
The difficulties for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been compounded because they would risk ire from the right if they deleted Mr. Trump’s comments and appeared to censor him. The president has previously accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of suppressing conservative voices on their platforms.
“The question of whether to take down” the president’s comments on social media “is an unwinnable argument,” said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation.
Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, said it continued “to remove definitive claims about false cures for Covid-19, including ones related to disinfectant and ultraviolet light.” YouTube said Mr. Trump’s comments did not violate its misinformation policy. Twitter said satire and discussions of Mr. Trump’s remarks that did not include a call to action, as well as his comments themselves, did not violate its policies.
The social media corporations got here underneath scrutiny after Mr. Trump, at his each day White Home briefing on the virus final Thursday, floated the idea that an “injection inside” the human body with a disinfectant could help combat the illness. He then turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, and asked if she had heard of using “the heat and the light” to treat the coronavirus.
“Not as a treatment,” Dr. Birx said, before Mr. Trump cut her off.
Medical experts and scientists immediately pounced on the comments as medically unsafe and urged people not to inject themselves with disinfectants or bleach.
Last Friday, after right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart published articles saying Mr. Trump’s words were being taken out of context, the president said he had made his comments about UV lights and disinfectant injections sarcastically.
By then, his remarks had already spread widely. Last Friday, mentions of a disinfectant cure on social media and television broadcasts spiked to 1.2 million, up from roughly 400,000 the day before, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.
Mr. Trump’s supporters also went to work online. Many found videos promoting UV light as a cure and shared them as evidence of support for the president’s remarks. They often cited Aytu BioScience, a pharmaceutical company that posted a video last Friday depicting an experimental UV technology designed to be inserted via a catheter into a patient to kill the coronavirus. That video has been mentioned across the internet and TV more than 17.1 million times since the Thursday briefing, according to Zignal Labs.
YouTube removed the video after The Times contacted the company about it; a spokeswoman said the video promoted an unsubstantiated medical treatment. Aytu BioScience did not respond to requests for comment.
Other supporters of Mr. Trump also posted their defense of the president’s comments on injecting disinfectant. Angela Stanton-King, a former reality-TV star who was pardoned by Mr. Trump this year for her role in a car-theft ring, tweeted on Friday, “I’m satisfied Trump performs the media for the fools they’re.” She added a video of a affected person showing to obtain UV gentle remedy “to kill viruses and micro organism.”
Her submit was retweeted almost 6,000 instances.
“My tweet stands for itself,” Ms. Stanton-King, a Republican who’s operating for Congress in opposition to Consultant John Lewis, a Democrat in Georgia, mentioned in an emailed assertion. “It appears to me that President Trump is making an attempt to steer the nation by means of these unprecedented instances, whereas all the pieces he says and does is distorted by the mainstream media in search of scores.”
This week, posts about various UV therapies that referred to Mr. Trump unfold extensively on Fb. Greater than 700 posts concerning the unproven remedies — revealed after the briefing — collected over 50,000 feedback and likes, in response to the Instances evaluation.
In some Fb teams which have lots of of hundreds of followers, folks posted pictures of chemical brokers that they mentioned they deliberate to devour. Mr. Trump, they wrote, had despatched them “a message” a couple of attainable treatment. In lots of of feedback, folks additionally supplied recommendation on the best way to procure and ingest the disinfectants.
On YouTube, the highest 10 search outcomes for Mr. Trump’s feedback returned movies from conventional information sources like CNN and Politico. However YouTube movies defending the president’s suggestion of UV lights and disinfectants had been reposted and shared in hundreds of right-wing Fb communities, personal chats and on-line boards, in response to the Instances evaluation.
On Twitter, The Instances discovered greater than 45,000 tweets discussing bleach and UV gentle cures for the coronavirus that stemmed from the president’s feedback. Lots of the posts mentioned Mr. Trump was proper about his instructed remedies.
David Brenner, director of the Heart for Radiological Analysis at Columbia College, noticed his personal research on utilizing UV lighting in public areas to kill the coronavirus cited extensively on Twitter. He mentioned his analysis was by no means meant to be explored as a treatment for the virus within the human physique.
When instructed that his analysis had been shared almost 300 instances on Twitter, principally by Mr. Trump’s supporters, and had reached 1.three million folks, Mr. Brenner was astounded.
“I by no means imagined that I used to be going to turn out to be a hero of the proper wing,” he mentioned.
Sheera Frenkel reported from San Francisco, and Davey Alba from New York.