Twitter Will Not Penalize Controversial Joe Biden Video Of Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Comments, Report Says
Former Vice President Joe Biden‘s campaign recently posted an ad to Twitter that attacks Donald Trump and his comments on the coronavirus. Although the media was deemed “video manipulation” by Washington Post fact-checker Meg Kelly, The Daily Caller reports that Twitter refused to label the clip under its new “manipulated media” policy.
According to the outlet, Twitter’s new policy began on March 5, two days before Biden’s video was posted on March 3. For this reason, the platform will reportedly not be tagging the footage as “manipulated media.”
Biden’s campaign advertisement is cut to make it appear as if Trump calls coronavirus a hoax, per The Daily Caller. In reality, the publication notes that Trump referred to the Democratic Party’s response to the virus as a hoax, but not coronavirus itself.
A second portion of the Biden campaign’s video is cut to suggest that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people.” As noted by The Daily Caller, the president’s comments were made during the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally, when he said there are “very fine people on both sides” of the controversy surrounding the Robert E. Lee statue.
When the White House posted an unedited video of Joe Biden, Twitter marked it as “manipulated media”
This video is ACTUALLY deceptively edited and pushes blatant lies about President Trump
Will Twitter flag this highly manipulated video from a Democrat?pic.twitter.com/DFTCX3bNT2
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 9, 2020
As noted by PolitiFact, the president clarified his remarks one day later.
“And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals.”
In her fact-checking piece for The Washington Post, Kelly concluded that the Biden campaign’s clip was intentionally misleading.
“Ultimately, the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak, the fact that Trump had clarified his comments on the matter before the ad was released, and the blatant way the Biden camp isolated his remarks about the American Dream pushed us to Four Pinocchios,” she wrote.
“Campaigns must be willing to make their case without resorting to video manipulation.”
As The Inquisitr previously reported, Twitter first used its manipulated media policy to tag a video that White House social media director Dan Scavino posted. The footage, which appeared to show Biden supporting the re-election of Trump, was later retweeted by the president. But after Biden’s remark in the clip, the Democratic front-runner continued his sentence, which made it clear he was not supporting the re-election of the president.
In response to the tag, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale lashed out at Twitter and claimed that the platform was trying to silence his campaign, as well as conservatives in general.
