Facebook and Twitter have censored President Trump and his campaign accounts at least 65 times in the last two years, while Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden and his camp have never been dinged, according to a report released Monday.
The conservative Media Research Center’s Techwatch department found that the tech giants had a decidedly lopsided approach to the presidential candidates and their campaigns when it comes to flagging and axing their content.
The biggest discrepancy came with Twitter, which accounted for 98% of the censorship incidents against the Trump camp from May 2018 to Oct. 16, 2020. The analysis did not include ads from PACs or super PACs.
“Twitter has been far and away the biggest offender, labeling, fact-checking, and removing Trump’s tweets and the tweets from his campaign accounts 64 times since the president’s election,” the report said. “Tweets about the president’s concern over mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests have been given ’public interest notices.’”
The report follows an outcry over the crackdown on the New York Post’s bombshell stories on emails reportedly taken from the laptop of Hunter Biden dealing with his financial relationships with the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma and a Chinese energy firm.
The Post’s Twitter account has been locked since Oct. 14 and users have been prevented from sharing the stories. Facebook spokesman Andy Stone, a former Democratic operative, said last week that the platform would reduce their distribution pending fact-checks.
Big Tech’s bias is clear and obvious.
— MediaResearchCenter (@theMRC) October 19, 2020
Twitter and Facebook have censored President @realDonaldTrump and his campaign at least 65 times combined.
Yet they haven’t touched any of Joe Biden’s accounts even once. https://t.co/wu5rlzkxmU
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
“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,” said the MRC report.
Memes have also taken a hit. A popular meme showing a photo of Mr. Trump pointing at the camera with the caption, “In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you/I’m just in the way,” was removed after he retweeted it June 30.
The meme was replaced with the message: “Media not displayed. This image has been removed in response to a report from the copyright holder.”
In addition, the Team Trump campaign account has had four videos removed, including a pro-life video pegged to the January 2020 March for Life that was replaced with the message: “This media may contain sensitive material.”
Twitter later said the warning was attached “in error” on the video, which featured couples with newborn babies and a pregnant woman viewing an ultrasound, was later removed, and removed the label.
Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have censored the Trump campaign five times, with Instagram removing a video criticizing Antifa because it showed an inverted triangle, which was used by Nazis to designate political prisoners, although the Trump camp argued that Antifa has also displayed the symbol.
“The ad was removed from both the president’s page and his campaign’s page,” the MRC report said. “However, multiple violent Antifa pages that have doxxed members of the Senate remain on the platform, unscathed.”
The Washington Times has reached out to Facebook and Twitter for comment.
Both companies have long denied that their decisions to restrict content are politically biased. An MRC report released last week showed 90% of donations from Facebook employees this year have gone to Democrats.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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