Twitter ‘Mistakenly’ Censors Video of Bernie Sanders Praising Fidel Castro

Twitter said it censored a video posted by MRCTV, the video arm of the Media Research Center, by “mistake.” The video showed a 1980s clip of Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) defending Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.

“You may recall way back in 1961 they invaded Cuba, and everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world,” said Sanders, at the beginning of the video. “They forgot that he educated the kids, gave them healthcare, totally transformed the society,” continued Sanders in the clip.

The clip also featured comments made by Sanders on 60 Minutes, again defending the Cuban communist regime.

“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro did it?”

The video can be watched in its entirety here.

Twitter initially hid the video behind a warning label stating, “The following media includes potentially sensitive content.” This forced users to click through the warning in order to see the clip, a form of censorship designed to result in less engagement for the video.

According to a Twitter spokeswoman, the tweet was flagged as sensitive media “in error,” and that this has now been corrected.

This is not the first time that a conservative media organization has been flagged as “sensitive” by Twitter. The platform did the same thing to posts from the Drudge Report in 2017. A year later, a similar label on Drudge posts led to President Trump and Donald Trump Jr’s posts linking to the website being hidden as “sensitive.”