After a demand from Twitter, Pastor Silas Malafaia deleted at least 11 posts in which he associated vaccination against Covid-19 for children with “infanticide”, an idea contrary to several studies that show that childhood immunization is safe.
The religious is the target of protests in the hashtag #DrubaMalafaia, where tweeters ask for his account to be banned. The episode takes place amid the crisis between the network and users about guidelines for dealing with fake news in the pandemic.
The social network told leaf, in a statement, which asked the religious leader to remove the content after finding that Malafaia’s tweets were “severely harmful” and violated the Covid-19 misleading information policy. The evangelist profile had its activities restricted for 12 hours. By the rules, the religious can still resort to the analysis of the platform.
The leader of the Vitória em Cristo Assembly of God told #Hashtag that he is “laughing” at the requests to remove his profile. “It’s a movement of ‘leftists’, people who hate me. I have to laugh, they gave the video a disgraceful publicity”, says Malafaia, referring to the material in which immunization is associated with the death of children – which contradicts statements by specialists from Brazil and the world.
In the footage, which was taken from Twitter but remains available on other networks, the pastor shows a screenshot of a study that cites data from the Ministry of Health from September 2021 to argue that the infant mortality rate by Covid-19 is low. .
“There is no serious risk of children dying. Who cares about this (child vaccination)? This is infanticide. This is absurd. If we had a high number of children dying, then it would be Sofia’s choice. says in the video.
In an interview with Folha, Malafaia criticized Twitter’s policy for dealing with flagging false content. “‘Nêgo’ puts pressure and Twitter first takes the post off the air and then asks you if you want to defend yourself. Have you seen that? They accuse you, put you in jail and say: ‘now you’re going to defend yourself’. That’s what Twitter does. It has to be the other way around. That’s a shame.”
Under the platform’s rules, penalties are applied to tweets that may expose people to more risk of contracting or transmitting the disease, such as those that deny the effectiveness of protective measures, suggest unapproved treatments or distort vaccine studies.
Punishments start with the use of a tag to signal that the tweet is misleading and can reach the permanent suspension of a user, when he commits from five offenses. As at least 11 posts by Malafaia violated the rules, users have asked the network to permanently ban the profile of the evangelical pastor.
Last week, the hashtag #TwitterSupportsFakeNews charged the site with a review on streams to flag untrue posts. The trigger for the demonstrations was the granting of the blue seal to Bolsonarista blogger Bárbara Destefani, from the page “Te Atualizei”. The activist is appointed by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) as a disseminator of fake news and saw her YouTube channel being demonetized by a court decision in 2020.
After user demonstrations against Barbara’s verification, the MPF (Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office) asked the platform, on Thursday (6), for explanations about the rules for dealing with fake news and verifying profiles. Twitter was given ten days to respond to the agency’s official letter and said it would only comment on the matter in the case file.
Check out below the main reactions to the deletion of posts by Pastor Silas Malafaia on Twitter:
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