Journalists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome are once again pretending to be media illiterate for the sake of attacking the president. Late Thursday night, Twitter tagged a video shared by President Donald Trump mocking CNN coverage of two babies running on the sidewalk as “manipulated content.”
“Terrified Todler Runs From Racist Baby,” a fake CNN chyron reads, before changing to “Racist Baby Probably A Trump Voter.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1273770669214490626?s=20
Twitter also released a news notification to users that “journalists confirmed” the video was fake.
Some were quick to link to the original story from CNN published in September to point out that the president’s obviously fake video was actually indeed fake.
Here's how CNN actually covered this video https://t.co/tzW7YbygBw
— Adrian D. Garcia (@adriandgarcia) June 19, 2020
This is not the first time Twitter has fact-checked Trump. In late May, the social media giant began to censor the president for tweets related to mail-in voting and nationwide rioting.
On May 26, Trump tweeted, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” prompting Twitter to tag the pair of tweets with notes reading, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”
Never mind that Trump’s claims about nationwide mail-in voting hold weight. In 2012, the New York Times headlined an article, “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.”
“There is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail, whatever its impact, is more easily abused than other forms,” the Times explained. “Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistic show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.”
In 2005, a commission chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III also found that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of voter fraud” and is “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.” Ballots can be sent to wrong addresses and “voting schemes are far more difficult to detect.”
Just two days later, Twitter fact-checked Trump again for condemning the violent protestors tearing down Minneapolis as “glorifying violence.”
Meanwhile, the brutal dictator of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has continued to post on the site explicitly to promote violence on the platform with no fear of censorship.
Serious question for @Twitter: Do these tweets from Supreme Leader of Iran @khamenei_ir violate "Twitter Rules about glorifying violence"? pic.twitter.com/oEkCC8UzFV
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) May 29, 2020
The clear double-standard has caught the attention of Washington lawmakers. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz called for a criminal investigation into the website for possible violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran by providing its leaders an online platform.
