Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro said people in the U.K. who have received two coronavirus vaccine doses are developing AIDS faster.- Facebook’s press office confirmed in an emailed statement to The Associated Press that the content was removed
- Facebook and Instagram removed posts by the far-right leader that violated community guidelines for COVID-19
Facebook and Instagram have removed a live broadcast that Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro delivered from their platforms, reports AP News.
About the criticism
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro said people in the U.K. who have received two coronavirus vaccine doses are developing AIDS faster than expected.
He spent months sowing doubt about vaccines, especially the one produced by Chinese firm Sinovac. He also warned Brazilians that there would be no legal recourse against Pfizer for anyone suffering side effects, and joked that might include women growing beards or people transforming into alligators.
Brazilian president’s statement
During a radio interview, Bolsonaro rebuked criticism he faced for allegedly spreading fake news with his claim about AIDS, and said he had merely read a news article published last October in Brazil.
The claim was among the most bizarre that the president, who contracted the virus last year and remains unvaccinated, has made about immunization against the coronavirus to date.
Facebook removes the post
Facebook’s press office confirmed in an emailed statement to The Associated Press that the content was removed Sunday night because it violated Facebook policy regarding COVID-19 vaccines.
Last year, Facebook and Instagram removed posts by the far-right leader that violated community guidelines for COVID-19, including one video in which he claimed the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine was curing COVID-19 the world over.
Broad testing has shown the drug to be ineffective in treating COVID-19. A few months later, Facebook removed dozens of accounts, some used by employees of Bolsonaro and two of his lawmaker sons, for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
But Monday marked the first time Facebook removed one of Bolsonaro’s weekly live broadcasts that serve as a direct channel of communication with his supporters and tend to rack up hundreds of thousands of views.
Supreme court’s investigation
The Supreme Court’s Justice Alexandre de Moraes is overseeing an investigation into the dissemination of allegedly false news that targets close allies of the president, two of his sons and — as of August — Bolsonaro himself.
Last week, de Moraes ordered the preventative imprisonment of a prominent Bolsonaro booster and blogger currently residing in the U.S, and directed the federal police to ask Interpol to put out a red alert.
Facebook’s actions in Brazil come amid a deluge of stories by 17 American media organizations, based on internal company documents that show, in many cases, the company failed to adequately and quickly deal with misinformation.
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Source: AP News
