The Media Research Center (MRC), a media watchdog organization founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III, revealed in an October 19 NewsBusters report that Big Tech — through their control of Twitter and Facebook — have censored President Trump’s social-media accounts and the accounts belonging to his reelection campaign at least 65 times. In contrast, notes MRC, the companies have not censored former Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his campaign accounts a single time.
“Big Tech has caused serious damage to President Donald Trump’s ability to be heard on social media. Twitter and Facebook have censored the president’s social media accounts and the accounts belonging to his re-election campaign at least 65 times. In contrast, the companies have not censored … Joe Biden and his campaign accounts. At all,” MRC analysts Corinne Weaver and Alec Schemmel wrote in the report.
Before arriving at its findings, the Media Research Center’s Techwatch department analyzed two years of social-media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns.
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MRC noted that Twitter has been the biggest offender by far; labeling, fact-checking, and removing Trump’s tweets and the tweets from his campaign accounts 64 times since the president’s election in 2016.
Among the examples Weaver and Schemmel listed of Twitter’s censorship were its removal of tweets from the president about the drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has mentioned as a possible treatment for COVID-19.
The report quoted a statement from the Daily Beast, which said: “Nearly 10 percent of the unverified accounts retweeted by President Trump since his inauguration are currently suspended from Twitter for various violations of the platform’s policies.”
One user was quoted in the Daily Beast as saying, “Twitter’s always been fair to me, until the president of the United States retweeted me.”
Even reports originating with the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-highest circulation newspaper, were not immune from Twitter’s censorship, noted Weaver and Schemmel. They reported that Twitter has come under fire for censoring the Post’s reports that detailed allegedly corrupt business deals by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
In an October 20 interview with Fox and Friends, political commentator Dave Rubin provided his take on statements made by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) about Twitter’s censorship of the Post report. Fox News noted that Cruz is set to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to question him on the decision to restrict the Post’s story and to block accounts that promoted it, including that of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the Trump 2020 campaign.
“If we are going to censor things, I think people want to see it as fair. The bigger issue here is I don’t think people trust [Facebook’s Mark] Zuckerberg. They don’t trust Jack [Dorsey] at Twitter anymore. So even if they are telling the truth, which generally speaking I don’t think they are … I think they have lost the trust of the users, and once you lose that trust, I don’t know how you get it back,” Rubin said.
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