Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has responded to accusations made by US President Donald Trump of one-sided censorship and illegally removing a George Floyd-related Trump campaign video from the social media platform.
“This was pulled because we got a DMCA complaint from [a] copyright holder,” Dorsey tweeted to the president on Friday night.
Trump accused the social media platform of illegally censoring the video, a point Dorsey disagrees with.
The video in question is around four minutes in length and shows images from protests around the nation over Floyd’s killing, while the president speaks about the tragedy of the Minneapolis man’s death.
The clip was also taken down from Instagram and Facebook over a similar Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint.
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It has not been revealed who is behind the complaint or which image’s rights are in question, but the video, titled ‘Healing Not Hatred’, remains on YouTube as of Saturday, though the YouTube upload reportedly does not contain the copyrighted material.
Trump has more consistently gone after Twitter in recent days as more of his material has been flagged. He previously lashed out at the company for applying labels to two of his tweets, one of which included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and another tying mail-in voting to potential fraud.
The company labeled the “looting” tweet as “glorifying violence” and fact-checked the mail-in tweet as “potentially misleading.”
Trump previously signed an executive order in response to the alleged censorship, stripping companies like Facebook and Twitter of liability protection for the content users post.
“Companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,” the president said.
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