Social media users are claiming that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) deleted sections from its website regarding early childhood development and facial cues for learning to enforce mask guidance on children. The organization told Reuters the content was removed during the migration of content to a different platform and will subsequently be republished.
Examples of posts making this claim can be seen here and here .
The text in one post reads: “Wow. The AAP is actively *deleting* entire sections from their website re early childhood development & the importance of facial cues for learning. They are memory holing decades of known & accepted medicine, all [because] they have embraced forced masking of our nations children. Wow.”
An archived version of the website showing the page the posts mention can be seen here . The non-archived link now forwards users to the AAP main webpage.
The AAP told Reuters via email on Thursday that it is processing a large migration of content from its website to a new platform and that a large amount of this process took place the previous weekend.
Some of the content items, such as “Early Brain and Child Development,” which are over a decade old, will likely be reviewed and updated before being re-published on the new platform, they said. While the timeline is uncertain, the AAP said it expects it to take place before the end of the year.
“The AAP can confirm that our web content migration has nothing to do with AAP’s mask guidance,” a spokesperson told Reuters. “The two are unrelated. “
AAP’s mask guidance can be seen here , in accordance with the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) visible here .
VERDICT
Misleading. This document is not viewable on the American Academy of Pediatrics’s website, but the organization said the content was removed during a migration of content to a new platform and will be republished.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here .
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.