Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks after being endorsed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., at a campaign rally Monday, March 2, 2020 in Dallas. (AP Photo/Richard W. Rodriguez)
Over the weekend, the higher-ups at Twitter sent a message that when it came to sharing videos that targeted political figures in a presidential election year, they intend on playing favorites.
On Saturday, White House social media director Dan Scavino shared a short video clip of Joe Biden during a recent campaign stop. The quote from Biden shown in the clip was “…turn this primary from a campaign that’s about negative attacks into one about what we’re for. Because we cannot get re-elect, we cannot win this re-election — excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump.”
Watch:
Sleepy Joe????in St. Louis, Missouri today:
“We can only re-elect @realDonaldTrump.”#KAG2020LandslideVictory???????? pic.twitter.com/FT4q2MWfcD
— Dan Scavino (@DanScavino) March 8, 2020
President Trump retweeted Scavino’s video and later retweeted someone else’s tweet that featured the same clip.
But in a sign of things to come in 2020 for the Trump campaign, Twitter has labeled the video “manipulated media”:
Just in: Twitter applied its new manipulated media label for the first time to a deceptively edited video of Joe Biden. It was shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino, and retweeted by the president. pic.twitter.com/PggcCwMNkx
— Cat Zakrzewski (@Cat_Zakrzewski) March 8, 2020
The warning is not showing up in the Tweet detail right now, but it is in individuals’ timelines. The company is working on a fix.
— Cat Zakrzewski (@Cat_Zakrzewski) March 8, 2020
Twitter reportedly believes the video was “manipulated”, which would be in violation of their “Synthetic and Manipulated Media” policy because the full quote, noted below in bold, was cut off:
“…turn this primary from a campaign that’s about negative attacks into one about what we’re for. Because we cannot get re-elect, we cannot win this re-election — excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad.“
But as other Twitter users pointed out, literally any video can be characterized as “manipulated” according to Twitter’s new standards, which were rolled out on March 5th:
For the First time, Twitter has applied the “Manipulated Media” label to a Video.
The Video was clipped, not edited, in a Tweet from @DanScavino that was Retweeted by President Trump.
This video was simply shortened.
This means every single clip on Twitter is “Manipulated”. https://t.co/mi8GI9ktAs
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) March 8, 2020
There are also campaign videos from Joe Biden that clearly manipulated quotes from Trump into something they were not:
Twitter just labeled a video from WH social media director Dan Scavino as being “manipulated”
Was it selectively edited?
Yes
Was it manipulated?
No
Yet this video from Joe Biden manipulates numerous things that Trump has said and Twitter is *not* labeling it as manipulated https://t.co/mNas65YgHQ
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 8, 2020
Twitter appears to be holding Republicans to one standard, while holding Democratic public figures to no standards. How utterly predictable.
