Twitter has moderated another one of Trump’s tweets. This time, it was flagged for “manipulated media”. The Tweet has since been taken down for copyright infringement.
Impeached US president Donald Trump is once again making headlines. This time, it is for a Tweet he made that featured a video. The video in question features two toddlers running down a sidewalk. One of the toddlers is black and is seen running ahead of a white toddler. Laid over top was an obviously fake CNN chyron and what people in the industry call “keys”. Keys are a term to describe the text over top to show who is speaking or add context to the video.
In this case, the key said something along the lines of “terrified toddler runs away from racist baby.” Part way through the video, the key changes to say something along the lines of “Probably a Trump supporter”. The video is, of course, fake and edited. Twitter flagged the video for being “manipulated media”, but left the video up.
The flag points to a Twitter thread/event.
The thread says that the video is from a CNN report in 2019 which features the friendship of two toddlers. In one response, a reporter pointed to the actual report on CNN in question. The report features a story about two toddlers who give each other a hug at first sight. It also raises the idea that racism may be a learned trait. All around, it is actually a very heartwarming story.
If you are wanting to see the doctored version on Twitter as it was posted by Trump, you are out of luck now. The original Tweet was hit with a DMCA. As a result, the video was subsequently pulled and is no longer viewable.
This isn’t the first time Trump has had one of his Tweets flagged for spreading false information. Last month, Trump posted a Tweet falsely claiming that mail-in ballots leads to fraud. When Twitter flagged the pair of Tweets and urged readers to get the fact, Trump vowed to hit back hard. The very next day, Trump signed an executive order trying to kill Section 230. In the subsequent time, Republican’s pressed the FCC to follow through with that executive order. Additionally, one Republican introduced Section 230 killing legislation in the Senate. So, things have escalated to Republican’s launching a full on assault on the law that protects platforms.
This latest moderation has occurred after Trump effectively did his worst to attack Internet platforms. At this point, Twitter doesn’t exactly have much to lose by flagging obviously false and misleading comments from the president. Trump has already emptied the clip on the Internet, so additional moderation isn’t going to make one bit of difference. Whether further moderation happens or not isn’t going to change the status of that executive order. Additionally, Trump has already said that he isn’t going anywhere because he knows that a majority of hi audience is on Twitter. So, moderation is actually a surprisingly safe move for the social media platform at this stage.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
