Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed during a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the platform has not censored President Donald Trump. A new study, however, claimed that Twitter censored the president 64 times and is “far and away the biggest offender” out of all the social media platforms.
Dorsey made the claim in response to questions from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) during a hearing where the Twitter CEO was repeatedly hammed by senators about bias and censorship.
Transcript and video below:
BLACKBURN: “Mr. Dorsey, is Donald Trump a world leader?”
DORSEY: “Yes.”
BLACKBURN: “Okay, so it would be important for world leaders to have access to your platform, correct?”
DORSEY: “Correct.”
BLACKBURN: “And so, why did you deny that platform via censorship to the U.S. president?”
DORSEY: “We haven’t censored the U.S. president.”
BLACKBURN: “Oh yes you have. How many posts from Iran’s terrorist Ayatollah have you censored?”
DORSEY: “Um.”
BLACKBURN: “How many posts from Vladimir Putin have you censored?”
DORSEY: “We have labeled tweets of world leaders. We have a policy around not taking down the content, but simply adding more context around it.”
BLACKBURN: “Okay, and the U.S. president you have censored 65 times. You testified that you’re worried about disinformation and election interference, that is something that we all worry about. And of course, for about a hundred years, foreign sources have been trying to influence U.S. policy and U.S. elections. Now, they’re onto your platforms, they see this as a way to get access to the American people. So, given your refusal to censor or ban foreign dictators, while regularly censoring the president, aren’t you at this very moment, personally responsible for flooding the nation with foreign disinformation?”
DORSEY: “Just to be clear, we have not censored. We have taken the tweets down that you’re referencing. They have more context in the label applied to them. And we do the same for leaders around the world.”
“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 Research Center reported. “Users who have been retweeted by Trump play a game of censorship roulette as well. According to The Daily Beast, ‘Nearly 10 percent of the unverified accounts retweeted by President Trump since his inauguration are currently suspended from Twitter for various violations of the platform’s policies.'”
WATCH:
Sen. Blackburn: "Looking at some of your censorings, you have censored Joe Biden zero times, Mr. Dorsey. You have censored Donald Trump 65 times."
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: "We have not censored the President."OH, Jack. There are receipts. pic.twitter.com/oGWEyHaPY9
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) October 28, 2020