Trump Campaign Chief Operating Officer Michael Glassner on Monday sent a letter to Twitter demanding one of former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign videos being deemed “manipulated media." According to Trump's re-election campaign, the video in question "contains misleading and edited audio that runs afoul of Twitter’s own new standards."
"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," the letter read.
The campaign said the video is "deceptively" edited and leaves out vital information:
Video clips presented deceptively and out of context by the Biden campaign include:
• Two separate videos of President Trump spliced together to fabricate a quote and give viewers the false impression that he called the coronavirus a “hoax.” This misinformation was previously fact-checked as false by a member of the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network.
• Two separate videos spliced together to give viewers the false impression that President Trump referred to white nationalists carrying torches 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.” As one CNN anchor said, “he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people[.]”
• A video from the 2016 campaign, before Donald Trump was elected, saying, “the American Dream is dead[.]” The Biden campaign edited the clip to cut out the second part of Trump’s sentence. What then-candidate Trump actually said in 2015 was this: “Sadly, the American dream is dead, 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.”
According to Glassner, the social media giant needs to apply the rules fairly across the board "in order for American elections to remain free and fair."
We can't sit by and lose this country to Donald Trump. Today, we take it back — together.
— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 3, 2020
Go vote: https://t.co/Hy8C4n0lUk pic.twitter.com/0YgyJFr9YR
Twitter changed its policy and labeled a Trump campaign video as "manipulated media," even though it was an unedited video of the former vice president saying, "We cannot win this re-election. Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump[.]"
The policy change was put in place to prevent the spread of "misinformation" and the Trump campaign video was the first time the policy had been implemented. Twitter developed the policy after former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg added crickets and a long pause to a video of the candidate asking his opponents if any of them had started a business.
I agree with Joe! https://t.co/h84mD7jVPW
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2020
Trump campaign rapid response director Andrew Clark told Fox News, “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."
"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," Clark said.
Although Twitter deemed the Trump campaign video "misinformation," Facebook said it doesn't fall under their "deceptive editing" regulations.
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