Twitter escalated its conflict with President Trump by labeling a video in one of his tweets as “manipulated media.”
On Thursday night, the president tweeted a video of two toddlers, one running away from the other, part of a clip that went viral in 2019. Edited to depict CNN misleadingly covering the footage, it showed the captions “Terrified toddler runs from racist baby” and “Racist baby probably a Trump voter.”
The video then shows the entire clip to reveal the two toddlers hugging and playing with one another. “America is not the problem,” a voiceover says. “Fake news is. If you see something, say something. Only you can prevent fake news dumpster fires.”
“This Tweet has been labeled per our synthetic and manipulated media policy to give people more context. More on our policies and approach here,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2020
Trump’s reelection campaign manager, Brad Parscale, later issued a warning to Twitter. “Hey @twitter, your days are numbered,” he tweeted, linking to another social media platform, Parler.
Hey @twitter, your days are numbered.https://t.co/IImpdRHYlG
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) June 19, 2020
In late May, Twitter applied a fact-checking label for the first time to one of the president’s tweets after he commented on mail-in voting.
“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people,” Trump claimed on Twitter.
Users who clicked the link were directed to several news articles that fact-checked Trump’s claim. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended the company’s actions in later tweets of his own.
“Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions,” Dorsey wrote in a thread of tweets. “Per our Civic Integrity policy, the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.”
