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A Twitter spokesperson said that a tweet on Thursday from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that children were “essentially immune” to the coronavirus did not violate the social media platform's new policies about discussion of the disease, despite the fact that it contradicted information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.



This is the first high-profile test of Twitter's new rules, which were put in place Monday to stem the spread of harmful disinformation about COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, on the site.

On Thursday, after hours of deliberating the merits of using his companies’ resources to build ventilators for the public health crisis and closing down Tesla’s factories, Musk took time to answer his followers' questions on Twitter, during which he cast doubt on predictions about the virus’s potential spread.

Earlier this month, he tweeted that “the coronavirus is dumb.” In a series of tweets on Thursday, he seemed to double down, predicting that there would be no new cases in the US by the end of April, in part because children were safe from the virus.

“Kids are essentially immune, but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable,” he tweeted. “Family gatherings with close contact between kids & grandparents probably most risky.”