By now, we’re well accustomed to double standards from Twitter — but Jack Dorsey’s social media is pushing the boundary even farther this election season.
Twitter is a company that will lock Andy Ngo out of his account and ban Tommy Robinson for stating facts. But the libs are allowed to call for violence against MAGA-hat wearing high school kids and keep their blue “verified” checkmarks.
We’re now starting to see how those double standards are going to play out in the election season.
Earlier this week, Twitter tagged a political ad from the Trump campaign with a label declaring it “manipulated media,” because it highlighted a gaffe from Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden. In a classic Biden brain-freeze moment, the former VP said “Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump.”
Because the ad didn’t include the following minute of Biden’s remarks, Twitter saw fit to label it “manipulated media.”
Yet as the Trump campaign highlighted in a letter to Twitter following the incident, there are numerous instances in which the Biden campaign has taken Trump’s comments out of context, without any response from the social media company.
Here are the examples cited by the letter:
• 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.”
These are far clearer examples of comments being spliced and taken out of context than the Trump campaign’s Biden clip, which merely showed an isolated comment from the Democrat candidate, without any splicing-together or juxtapositioning. Biden has been peddling the “very fine people” hoax to anyone who will listen, including half-empty gyms as documented by Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak.
Twitter, predictably, has not taken any action on the examples cited by the Trump campaign.
“In order for American elections to remain free and fair,” wrote the Trump campaign, “it is critical that the Biden campaign be held to the same standard it is demanding apply to others.”
It’s good to see the Trump campaign punching back and exposing Silicon Valley’s hypocrisy. But expecting fair standards from these companies is much the same as waiting for CNN to give the President credit for four years of economic growth: it’ll happen when hell freezes over.
The simple fact is, Twitter seems to think that “manipulated media” is just fine if you’re a Democrat, just as death threats and other violent language seem to be OK by them if it’s directed at Trump-supporting high schoolers.
It is abundantly clear at this point that the only thing that can stop Silicon Valley from corrupting American democracy is the power of the American government. It would be great if someone in the Oval Office was willing to use it.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.