Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Corinne Weaver and Alec Schemmel ranted in an Oct. 19 post:
Big Tech has caused serious damage to President Donald Trump’s ability to be heard on social media.
Twitter and Facebook have censored the president’s social media accounts and the accounts belonging to his re-election campaign at least 65 times. In contrast, the companies have not censored former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his campaign accounts. At all.
Twitter composes the bulk of the problem, with 98 percent of all the instances of censorship. 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.
The Media Research Center’s Techwatch department analyzed two years of social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns. The analysis did not include any ads from PACs or super PACs that had made ads in favor of either candidate. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns. These numbers were collected from between May 2018 to October 16, 2020.
An alternative -- and, one can say, more reality-based -- reading of those statistics taht Weaver and Schemmel won't acknowledge: Trump broke the rules at Facebook and Twitter 65 times, and Biden didn't break them at all. As Media Matters' Parker Mallow aptly pointed out, enforcement of the rules is not "censorship" or "bias," and the fact that Trump is continued to be allowed to use Facebook and Twitter despite these multiple violations of the rules is actually a pro-Trump bias on their part; for instance, when someone makes a claim that a video Trump tweeted uses music and images that are copyrighted and the copyright holder objects, Twitter has a legal obligation to remove them. (We've previously noted how the MRC -- ostensibly conservatives who value private property rights -- loves it when those rights are violated for pro-Trump purposes.) Indeed, the examples Weaver and Schmmel cited are not "censorship" but, in fact, instances of Trump breaking the platforms' rules.
A few days earlier, the MRC's Joseph Vazquez helped further this narrative under the false headline "Facebook and Twitter Contribute Over 90% to Dems." In fact, once you get past Vazquez's ridiculously hyperbolic assertin that Facebook and Twitter "snapped into the full-on Orwellian Ministry of Truth," the vast majority of those donations came from employees of Facebook and Twitter -- who have free will in donating to who they please, and whose donations are not necessarily reflective of any purported "bias" on the platforms, however fervently the MRC wants that to be true -- not the company itself.
Weaver and Schemmel reference Vazquez's post but couldn't get their factstotally straight: "In addition, Twitter and Facebook employees have funneled money into Democrat campaigns. In a previous study released by MRC Business, the numbers showed that Facebook and Twitter had given over 90 percent of their political contributions to Democrats in 2020." Like Vazquez, the two didn't prove that such donations by employees equated to "bias" or "censorship" of conservatives.
The core of the MRC's argument here, Malloy added, is that it believes social media rules shouldn't apply to themselves and Trump. Sounds about right.
