Facebook and Twitter Have Censored Trump and His Campaign 65 Times, Biden 0 Times - Report
Social media’s censorial policies in favor of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden became big news last week after New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s emails were embargoed by Twitter and throttled by Facebook.
The unintended consequence of this censorship was to draw more attention to the stories, but this isn’t always the case.
The proof of this is the fact the two biggest social media networks have been censoring President Donald Trump and his campaign for a long time — and nobody particularly cared.
According to an analysis by the Media Research Center, Facebook and Twitter have censored accounts belonging to Trump or his re-election campaign 65 times in the past two years.
Biden and his campaign, meanwhile, have been censored a grand total of — zero times.
To be fair, there’s one platform that’s accounted for most of this.
“Twitter has been far and away the biggest offender, labeling, fact-checking, and removing Trump’s tweets and the tweets from his campaign accounts 64 times since the president’s election,” the Media Resource Center’s NewsBusters website reported Monday.
“Tweets about the president’s concern over mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests have been given ‘public interest notices,'” it said.
The battle between Trump and Big Tech has been going on for a while, but it heated up in May when Twitter put a fact-check notice on a tweet the president made regarding mail-in ballot fraud.
“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed,” Trump tweeted.
Below this was a big, warning saying, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”
….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
“These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others,” Twitter’s fact-check page said. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”
This was one of the two more controversial tweets the president made, so it might get a grumbling “fair enough” — until you saw the explanation from Twitter Safety, an official apologia account that is now best known for laundering the platform’s less-savory moves.
It said, in an evidence-free manner, “We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.”
We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020
How Twitter came up with this logic is beyond me, but there you go.
The next problematic tweet from the president was the sharing of a video by America’s Frontline Doctors in late July. That, in case you’ve forgotten, is a group of physicians who believe in the benefits of hydroxychloroquine to ameliorate the symptoms of COVID-19. The group is a, well, difficult one and their cause is controversial. However, both the rapidity and the acidity of the response was worth noting — Twitter deleted the president’s tweet for the first time.
All right, then — you’ve got a 2-0 score for Trump. How do you get to 65-0?
Well, by profoundly silly bans like one of a meme showing a white and black toddler playing and running away from each other. The video was doctored with obviously fake CNN chyrons such as “Terrified Todler Runs From Racist Baby” and “Racist Baby Probably Voted for Trump.”
This produced a similar news alert: “Video being shared of CNN report on toddlers is doctored, journalists confirm.” Apparently, journalists were needed to confirm this.
The meme creator who came up with that, Carpe Donktum, was removed from the platform over the video because of copyright violations, apparently because Twitter isn’t particularly interested in fair use.
Another parody video removed from the platform involved Biden playing NWA’s “F— tha Police” into the microphone at an event with his cellphone. PolitiFact “fact-checked” this and found it to be false, which led to the video being banned. (He actually played”Despacito,” in case you were wondering.)
Facebook does its part too.
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a speech given at Georgetown University on Oct. 17, 2019 that Facebook would ‘continue to stand for free expression,'” Newsbusters reported. “But since then, Trump and the Trump campaign have been censored on the platform five times. Instagram, Facebook’s sister company, removed one video as well. Each time, the platform has made the statement that it opposes whatever Trump and the campaign have said or stood for.”
According to the Media Research Center, this included a ridiculous incident where a video regarding antifa was taken down from Facebook because it was found to have violated the “platform’s ‘organized hate policy’ for featuring an upside-down red triangle. The ad asked supporters ‘to sign a petition’ and ‘stand with your President and his decision to declare ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization.’ The ad was removed from both the president’s page and his campaign’s page. However, multiple violent Antifa pages that have doxxed members of the Senate remain on the platform, unscathed.”
The score thus far: 65-0. And I guarantee you, Facebook and Twitter will run it up before Election Day and beyond.
Still think Big Tech doesn’t have an anti-conservative bias? The numbers don’t lie.
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