President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign team is taking issue with social media titan Twitter once again. This coming after the social media giant refused to apply its “manipulated media” warning tags to two new videos released by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
As The Hill reported Wednesday:
It’s the second time in a week that Twitter has shut down requests from the Trump campaign to sanction Democratic attack ads that the president’s allies say were deceptively edited.
Twitter recently slapped a manipulated media tag on a pro-Trump ad, leading to allegations from the president’s campaign that the company is only enforcing its standards in favor of Democrats.
“Twitter’s arbitrary rules only seem to apply to the Trump campaign,” Spokesman Andrew Clark said. “Once again, they’ve failed to provide any sort of clarity about why they are censoring video of Joe Biden’s obvious issues while giving a pass to deceptively edited videos spread by his campaign and his allies. The DNC’s manipulated videos have been fact-checked as false, so it’s difficult to read Twitter’s refusal to label these videos as anything else than an effort to protect Joe Biden.”
One tweet in question claimed, “Yesterday, Trump said he didn’t disband the government’s pandemic response team. He lied. Here he is earlier this year defending doing just that.”
Yesterday, Trump said he didn’t disband the government’s pandemic response team.
He lied. Here he is earlier this year defending doing just that: pic.twitter.com/oQOBFZLv1u
— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) March 14, 2020
The corresponding video shows Trump talking about “the people we cut” because “I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.” Though FactCheck.org deemed the ad misleading. That clip edited out NBC’s Peter Alexander probing him just before, “Is it possible that your impulse to put a positive spin on things may be giving Americans a false sense of hope?”
A representative of Twitter told in reply, “Our site integrity team has reviewed both pieces of media against the Synthetic and Manipulated Media Policy and determined both do not qualify for a label at this time.”
Just days prior they pinned a “manipulated media” tag on the Trump campaign video after it did not include Biden’s full remarks and therefore had been taken out of context.
Trump’s team previously had flagged content saying it was deceptively edited to seem like the president had called the coronavirus a “hoax.” The president’s full statement read, “Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs, you say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ ‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’ They have no clue, they don’t have any clue … and this is their new hoax. But you know we did something that’s been pretty amazing.”
A Trump campaign source said they would continue to flag media for Twitter “until they decide to start applying their standards equally.” The social media war is quickly ramping up.
