Twitter has finally stepped in and deleted a post from The Federalist that links to their article suggesting a program intentionally infecting healthy Americans with the coronavirus. The highly-controversial article which runs counter to medical experts’ advice effectively suggests coronavirus parties as a “social activity,” a database of every person in the U.S. and their COVID-19 infection status, and wonders: “Will we allow parents to make these sorts of infection decisions for both themselves and their children?”
“This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules,” is the message social media users trying to access The Federalist’s tweet now receive.
Facebook has not deleted The Federalist’s post promoting its article. NCRM will not link to it but our original reporting on the article is here.
The article itself, penned by an Oregon dermatologist, has not been taken down, but it has been removed from the front page and does not appear in the website’s list of most popular stories, which given the controversy surrounding it, likely is.
“Twitter initially added a warning to the link stating that the post might be ‘unsafe,'” Mediaite reports. Twitter then “temporarily locked” The Federalist’s account, but it is once again active, sans the offensive and dangerous tweet, which read: “It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.”
“Twitter has taken aggressive measures to crack down on misinformation surrounding the coronavirus,” but there is still a tremendous amount of user-generated bad information on the platform.
As NCRM reported earlier, aside from the obvious problems with the article itself, the author ignores the fact that there is no proof re-infection would not happen after the coronavirus parties. There is sufficient anecdotal information to suggest at least some can “catch” the virus after recovery.
The Federalist is a right wing website whose secret finding has been the source of much online speculation. It advocates increasingly extremist viewpoints, and was co-founded by Ben Domenech, who is a regular on NBC’s and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.”