Twitter labels video retweeted by Trump as ‘manipulated media’
Washington DC, Jun 18 (efe-epa).- Twitter on Thursday labeled an edited video that was retweeted by the United States president on his account, saying that its content violated the company’s rules.
The video retweeted by Donald Trump is a doctored version of a video, which was originally run by CNN in 2019.
The video, which went viral, shows two toddlers, one black and one white, run to hug each other in the street.
The version shared by Trump begins with a segment of the video in which the white toddler appears to chase the black boy and is labeled “terrified toddler runs from racist baby” and “racist baby probably a Trump voter” next to the CNN logo.
This edited segment then goes on to show the original video, in which the two children run towards each other to embrace, followed by the message “America is not the problem. Fake news is.”
Twitter labeled this video as “manipulated media” and sent some of its users an alert with a link in which it gives more details about the case.
“In September 2019, CNN reported on a viral video about a friendship between two toddlers. On Thursday, the president shared a version of the video which many journalists confirmed was edited and doctored with a fake CNN chryon,” Twitter says.
This is the third time Twitter has labelled tweets posted by Trump in the last few weeks, which has infuriated the US president, who for years has used the microblogging site to communicate directly with his 80 million followers without going through the filter of the media.
On the first occasion, Twitter inked messages from Trump with verified information that contradicted what the president had published, a procedure on the social network that until now had not been applied to the president.
The alerts came after Trump wrote posts in which he said voting by mail in the US presidential election in November would inevitably have a “substantially fraudulent” outcome and would lead to a “rigged election.”
The second time Twitter took action against Trump was when it hid a message by him on the racial protests for “glorifying violence.”
Twitter’s decision comes on the same day that Facebook removed an ad by Trump’s re-election campaign on the grounds that it contained a symbol used by Nazis in the concentration camps, indicating increased scrutiny of the president by Silicon Valley companies.
Trump has described Twitter’s actions as “censorship” and signed an executive order late May aimed at determining if his administration could punish Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google if they tried to moderate content posted on their platforms. EFE-EPA
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