2020 election social media blocks: Trump 65, Biden 0

FPI / October 20, 2020

Twitter and Facebook have censored President Donald Trump's social media accounts and the accounts belonging to his re-election campaign at least 65 times during this election season, a media watchdog group noted.

Number of times Joe Biden and his campaign accounts have been censored?

Zero.

"Twitter composes the bulk of the problem, with 98 percent of all the instances of censorship. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Twitter has made the decision to censor major headlines about the Biden family, particularly when it came to the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine," the Media Research Center reported on Monday.

Twitter has labeled, fact-checked, and removed Trump’s tweets and the tweets from his campaign accounts 64 times. Tweets about the president’s concern over mail-in voting, the coronavirus, and the Black Lives Matter riots have been given “public interest notices,” the Media Research Center noted.

Videos retweeted by the president depicting a satirical version of Biden walking on stage to the song “F*** Tha Police” have been deleted as well, after a fact-check from Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. The actual video showed Biden playing the song "Despacito.”

On July 28, Twitter removed three of Trump's tweets about the drug hydroxychloroquine and its effectiveness in early treatment for covid.

"Memes apparently are not allowed on the president’s account either," the Media Research Center noted.

A meme showing Trump saying “in reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you” was removed from his June 30 tweet.

"Meme videos and meme creators who make pro-Trump content have suffered at the hands of Twitter. One instance is Carpe Donktum, the meme creator who made a video mocking the Democrats’ reaction to the 2019 State of the Union address. The video, retweeted by Trump, was removed after a copyright complaint. Donktum, whose real name is Logan Cook, was also removed in June 2020 after Trump had tweeted another one of his videos showing two toddlers hugging each other, with fake CNN chyrons at the bottom," the Media Research Center noted.

Trump and the Trump campaign have been censored by Facebook five times, the report said. Instagram, Facebook’s sister company, removed one video as well.

A video attacking Antifa was removed from the platform, because it violated the platform’s “organized hate policy” for featuring an upside-down red triangle, the report said. The ad asked supporters “to sign a petition and "stand with your President and his decision to declare ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization.” The ad was removed from both the president’s page and his campaign’s page.

However, the Media Research Center noted, "multiple violent Antifa pages that have doxxed members of the Senate remain on the platform, unscathed."

The Media Research Center’s Techwatch department analyzed the social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns. The analysis did not include ads from PACs or super PACs that had made ads in favor of either candidate. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns.

A Media Research Center report released last week showed 90 percent of donations from Facebook and Twitter employees this year have gone to Democrats.

Free Press International