The Trump campaign blasted Twitter’s leadership in a scorching letter after the social media platform dubbed one of its videos “manipulated media,” saying Joe Biden’s team has uploaded videos that have been “doctored and deceptively edited.”
“The Biden campaign is scared as hell that voters will see the flood of unedited and embarrassing verbal stumbles that will continue go viral if ‘Status Quo Joe’ is the nominee,” Trump campaign rapid response director Andrew Clark told Fox News. “Twitter shouldn’t be an enforcement arm of Joe Biden’s campaign strategy, but if they choose to police every video clip they must hold his own campaign to the same standard.”
Over the weekend, Twitter flagged a post retweeted by President Trump as “manipulated media,” the first time the social media giant has targeted the president for such action.
The Twitter post came from Dan Scavino, the White House’s social media director, and showed former Vice President Joe Biden saying: “We cannot win this re-election, excuse me, we can only re-elect Donald Trump.”
Sleepy Joe💤in St. Louis, Missouri today:
“We can only re-elect @realDonaldTrump.”#KAG2020LandslideVictory🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/FT4q2MWfcD
— Dan Scavino (@DanScavino) March 8, 2020
Twitter formally unveiled a new policy last month that says media that has been “significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated” can be thusly labeled if the social media company determines it is deliberately misleading.
“You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm,” the company said in a blog post. “In addition, we may label Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide additional context.”
The clip retweeted by Trump wasn’t “manipulated,” but it was cut off. Biden, speaking in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday, actually said: “We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here.”
The Trump camp said Team Biden is trying to intimidate social media platforms.
“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,” Trump campaign chief operating officer Michael Glassner wrote in the letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, general counsel Vijaya Gadde, and public policy director Carlos Monje.
“Still, 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,” he added in the letter, obtained by Fox News.
Glassner also wrote that he was “formally requesting that Twitter apply its new ‘manipulated media’ label to a doctored and deceptively edited video tweeted by the Biden campaign less than a week ago,” referring to a March 3 video uploaded by the Biden campaign that takes clips out of context and “manipulates audio and video of President Trump in order to mislead Americans and give a false impression.”
We can't sit by and lose this country to Donald Trump. Today, we take it back — together.
Go vote: https://t.co/Hy8C4n0lUk pic.twitter.com/0YgyJFr9YR
— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 3, 2020
The video, Glassner writes, has two clips “spliced together to fabricate a quote and give viewers the false impression that he called the coronavirus a ‘hoax.'” In fact, the president called Democrats’ response to the coronavirus “their new hoax.”
Glassner also said the Biden campaign has been misleading by repeatedly claiming Trump called white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., “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,'” Glassner wrote. “As one CNN anchor said, ‘he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people[.]'”
The Trump campaign CEO wrapped up his letter with a warning to Twitter.
“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,” Glassner wrote.