The Trump campaign is accusing Twitter of playing favorites by labeling one of President Trump’s videos “manipulated media” while ignoring “deceptively edited” videos posted by former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s campaign.
In a scathing letter to Twitter’s top officials, Trump campaign Chief Operating Officer Michael Glassner said “it appears that many people employed by Big Tech corporations in Silicon Valley are assisting the Biden campaign by instituting a special ’Biden protection rule’ that effectively censors and silences legitimate political speech Biden’s campaign and its supporters do not like.”
Twitter took the unprecedented step Sunday of labeling as “manipulated media” a video shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by Mr. Trump. It was the first time Twitter has taken such action since establishing the new policy on March 5 to label tweets that contain manipulated or synthetic media.
The edited clip showed Mr. Biden stumbling over his words at a campaign rally in Kansas City, Missouri.
In the video, Mr. Biden says he wants to “turn this primary from a campaign that’s about negative attacks into one about what we’re for, because we cannot get, reelect, we cannot win this reelection, excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump.”
The video omitted the end of Mr. Biden’s rambling sentence, in which he said, “We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s got to be a positive campaign.”
Mr. Glassner asked Twitter to “apply its new ’manipulated media’ label to a doctored and deceptively edited video tweeted by the Biden campaign less than a week ago.”
He was referring to a March 3 video uploaded by the Biden campaign that contains clips taken out of context and “manipulates audio and video of President Trump in order to mislead Americans and give a false impression,” Mr. Glassner wrote late Monday.
“Understandably, the Biden campaign has a strategic interest in intimidating social media companies into suppressing true and embarrassing video evidence of Joe Biden’s continued inability to communicate coherently — a sad truth that has been publicly noted by Democrats and media figures alike,” Mr. Glassner wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, general counsel Vijaya Gadde, and public policy director Carlos Monje.
Twitter had no immediate comment on the letter.
The Biden video, Mr. Glassner noted, contains two clips “spliced together to fabricate a quote and give viewers the false impression that [Mr. Trump] called the coronavirus a ’hoax.’” The president actually called Democrats’ response to the coronavirus “their new hoax.”
Mr. Glassner said the Biden video also repeats a false claim that the president called white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people.” The president was referring to people on both sides of the issue of removing Confederate statues from public places as “very fine people.”
“In fact, 49 seconds after President Trump said those words, he said, ’and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,’” Mr. Glassner wrote. “As one CNN anchor said, ’he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people.’”
The Biden video also contains an edited clip from 2016 in which Mr. Trump says “the American dream is dead.” But it omits the second part of Trump’s sentence, in which he says, “but if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.”
Mr. Glassner told Twitter’s executives, “Of course, this is not the first time the Biden campaign has used editing tricks to manipulate video and feed misinformation to the American people.”
“If Twitter is not seeking to protect Joe Biden, we urge it to correct its apparent oversight and apply its standards equally across the board,” he wrote.
Biden campaign manager Greg Schultz criticized Facebook for initially leaving the Trump video online, saying the video contained “vile lies.” The platform later labeled the video “partly false” and said it would limit distribution.
“Facebook’s malfeasance when it comes to trafficking in blatantly false information is a national crisis in this respect,” Mr. Schultz said in a statement. “Facebook won’t say it, but it is apparent to all who have examined their conduct and policies: they care first and foremost about money and, to that end, are willing to serve as one of the world’s most effective mediums for the spread of vile lies. Their unethical behavior is not acceptable, and it must change.”
The campaign did not comment about Twitter’s policies.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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