| Hi all, it's Eric. Social media companies have long resisted fact-checking politicians, maintaining that the public should be able to hear directly from these important figures and decide for themselves what they believe. But the serious consequences posed by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus or the upcoming presidential elections have forced the companies to act. In the last few weeks Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google-owned YouTube have all taken action against one of the most prolific social media posters, U.S. President Donald Trump. In the most recent dust up, Facebook and Twitter blocked a video posted by Trump's re-election campaign showing the president claiming in an interview with Fox News that children are "virtually immune" from Covid-19 and that children "don't have a problem, they just don't have a problem." While the risk of death appears to be lower for younger children, children can spread the virus and do fall ill. It's worth noting that the Trump interview ran on Fox News, but isn't allowed on social media. Last week, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter took down links to a video posted by conservative news site Breitbart that featured a group calling themselves America's Frontline Doctors arguing that hydroxychloroquine is a safe remedy for Covid-19 and that people don't need to wear masks. Researchers have not demonstrated in a serious double-blind study that hydroxychloroquine meaningfully helps address the virus; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases does recommend wearing masks to helped slow the virus's spread. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the video and the President retweeted references to it. Both were taken down, first by Twitter and then YouTube and Facebook.
Despite their best efforts to avoid it, social media companies have been thrust into the role of arbiters of truth online. Part of it stems from the fact that they have so much more control over the debate than other media outlets, with their massive online audiences.Traditional media sites, whose own fact-checkers repeatedly flag the president's false statements, often must end up amplifying the president's words in order to fact-check them. And mainstream news sites can't control what the president says on conservative news channels, which have proven willing to broadcast misinformation with little qualification.
In his interview with Fox and Friends, Trump's comments about children and coronavirus were met with silence even as the president seemed to signal that he knew that he might face criticism somewhere for his remarks. About his claims that children are safe from the coronavirus, Trump said, "I hate to use the word `totally' because the news will say `oh he made the word totally and he shouldn't have used that word,' but the fact is that they are virtually immune from this problem and we have to open our schools." The confrontations between social media companies and the president and his supporters are coming in what could be the final year of Trump's presidency, should he lose to Democratic challenger Joe Biden in November. Some commentators have noted that one of the news media's most aggressively fact-checked segments, an interview with Trump on Axios on HBO, came this week because Trump's power seems to be waning. If there's a new president in 2021, will social media accuracy censors remain such a force in politics? So far, no posts from Biden or his campaign have been taken down -- presumably because he hasn't spread misinformation about the election or the pandemic. Or will social media companies relinquish their new position as the gatekeepers of responsible discourse around matters of life, death and democracy if we have a president who restricts himself to more standard political lies? --Eric Newcomer | 
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