The Trump campaign has sent a scathing letter to Twitter’s leadership after the platform took the unprecedented step of labeling one of its videos “manipulated media,” saying that under the social media giant’s new standard, Joe Biden’s team has uploaded its own “doctored and deceptively edited” video as recently as last week.
“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.”
The confrontation began this weekend when Trump communications director Dan Scavino tweeted an edited version of a Biden speech in which the former vice president appears to deliver a muddled and inadvertent endorsement of Trump. Scavino’s clip, which the president later reposted, did not alter any of Biden’s words, but it cut off before the conclusion of Biden’s sentence at a rally in St. Louis. Conservatives called the video an obvious attempt to highlight Biden’s verbal gaffes, and argued that no one would reasonably mistake it for a genuine Biden endorsement.
Unemployment Could Rise to 30%
De Blasio Calls For National Enlistment Program For Medical Personnel
Donald Trump Assembles Government and Private Industry to Fight Coronavirus
“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 missive 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 said 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.”
That was a reference to a March 3 video uploaded by the Biden campaign that contains a slew of clips that are taken out of context, and “manipulates audio and video of President Trump in order to mislead Americans and give a false impression,” Glassner wrote.
