President Donald Trump got the highest-level fact-check on a tweet Friday — by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself.
A Trump campaign video was yanked Thursday following a complaint about copyright infringement, which was clearly explained when the video was removed. The takedown request came from the owner of one of the images included in the video, though Twitter did not reveal who made the request.
The video was also removed from Facebook and Instagram Friday after Facebook received the same request, Variety reported.
Trump complained Friday about the move to pull the video, which he said revealed his “empathy for peaceful protesters” after the police killing of George Floyd. He accused Twitter of “fighting hard for the Radical Left Democrats. A one sided battle,” Trump added. “Illegal. Section 230!”
Dorsey shot back almost immediately: “Not true. And not illegal. This was pulled because we got a DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] complaint from copyright holder.”
In fact, it’s copyright infringements that are illegal. Trump’s reference to Section 230 is a law he wants changed to provide social media companies fewer protections regarding speech.
Trump has only recently been pulled up by Twitter for his tweets. Twitter added a fact-check alert to his claim in two tweets last month that mail-in ballots are often fraudulent. It also labeled as “glorifying violence” his message “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” referring to demonstrators protesting the death of Floyd, a Black man, during a brutal arrest by white police officers in Minneapolis.
The video Trump referred to Friday had been posted by Trump campaign.
Trump and his supporters have accused Twitter of a liberal bias. But critics complain that the president gets away with messages that would be completely unacceptable by average users.
Twitter on Friday imposed a 12-hour lock on an account that posted Trump’s tweets verbatim. Account @SuspendThePres was set up to determine if Twitter’s algorithms would flag it as inappropriate. It hit its goal in less than three days, after posting Trump’s May 29 tweet calling protesters “THUGS” and threatening violent intervention in Minneapolis.
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