Twitter is not letting the battle of ideas proceed without tipping the scale towards liberals.
First, they put a warning label on President Trump’s Tweet about mail-in ballots leading to vote fraud. In its counterclaim, Twitter erroneously asserted, “Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election’ . . . there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”
But Twitter wasn’t done. Last Thursday, when Trump tweeted about the riots in Minneapolis, Twitter took down his Tweet on the basis that it was “glorifying violence.” Few people actually got to read it, but Trump’s tweet didn’t glorify violence. It was more of a warning about the consequences of looting. Here is the full text:
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
As is typical with the media, they interpreted Trump’s comments in the worst possible way. Nowhere does Trump say that shooting people would be good or desirable. He says that looting dishonors George Floyd’s memory.
Trump’s statement hardly needed clarification, but the President Tweeted out a little later that day:
“Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night – or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means….”
On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd snidely said that Trump “tried to walk that back,” implying that Trump was disowning what he had originally written.
But if there is still any doubt about Twitter’s and the media’s bias, just compare how they handled other Tweets came much closer to glorifying violence, but were not censored.
Colin Kaepernick’s Tweet on May 28th is still up, despite drawing complaints. It read:
“When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction. The cries for peace will rain down, and when they do, they will land on deaf ears, because your violence has brought this resistance. We have the right to fight back!”
Doesn’t that sure sound as if Kaepernick is approving of the violence? Or take a Tweet from another black liberal, Corey Emanuel. In response to those who say “I don’t get the rationale of the riots,” he wrote:
“For clarity, these are not riots. This is an uprising – a violent rebellion against an entire system that has carefully crafted the ill-treatment of black people since being forced into this country. . . .”
Again, unlike a president who is warning that riots would result in violence, this Tweet is calling for violence. Kaepernick and Emanuel apparently both believe that violence is justified.
But Twitter has no problem with these or many other Tweets calling for violence by those on the left.
And there is still no concrete evidence that the officer who killed George Floyd was racist. People can be bad law enforcement officers without being racist. In Dallas, in 2016, a white man died after being arrested in the exact same way. The officers joked about the man being asleep, but he had actually died after pleading for help “more than 30 times.”
Sadly, so many of the victims of this violence have been blacks. Black store owners have lost their businesses. In these heavily black areas, blacks will lose their jobs. Black shoppers worry they “have nowhere to go now.”
Twitter is biased towards one side of the debate. In fact, it is willing to go out of its way by distorting and censoring statements by the President of the United States. If that’s not divisive, nothing is.
John Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.