(Riya Singh, Intern Journalist): Superstar singer Madonna was blocked for sharing misleading rumors about a possible cure for covid-19 on Instagram after she posted clips from a video that Donald Trump also re-tweeted. In her post, Madonna said that there had been a proven vaccine available for months but it was kept secret. She added a video of Stella Immanuel, a US surgeon who praised hydroxychloroquine as a miraculous treatment for coronavirus. In recent days, numerous recordings of Immanuel’s speech have spread quickly over the internet, but hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, has not been proved successful against covid-19.
“We’ve removed this video for making false claims about cures and prevention methods for COVID-19,” a company spokeswoman for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told on Wednesday.
President Donald Trump tweeted several video clips before the tweets were removed. His son Donald Trump Jr. was briefly barred from tweeting on Tuesday after posting portions of the video too.
Madonna said she had recovered from the coronavirus which forced her earlier in the year to pull out of concerts in Paris. Various media outlets are working with the fact-checking program on Facebook, in which content deemed incorrect is downgraded to news feeds so that very few users see it. If anyone attempts to share such a message, an article will be provided detailing why the information is not correct.