Twitter, Facebook & Instagram Scraped A Trump Campaign Video Over Copyrights Complaint

After receiving copyright complaints, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have all deleted a Trump campaign video from their platforms, Reuters reported. The nearly four-minute video featured photos of Minneapolis’ late George Floyd, who died May 25th after a police officer kneeled for more than eight minutes on his back. A video of the incident has prompted protests of police violence across the country. 

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Twitter disabled the video, while posts containing the video were removed from Facebook and Instagram. When President Trump objected in a tweet to the removal calling it “illegal,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey answered: “Not true, not illegal. This was pulled because we got a DMCA complaint from copyright holder.”

A Facebook spokesperson, who owns Instagram, told Reuters that a copyright petition had also been issued under the New Millennium Copyright Act. “Organizations using original art shared on Instagram are expected to be entitled to do so,” said the spokesperson. YouTube did not remove from its platform a version of the video, saying that it did not contain the content that violated copyright. The YouTube version of the video had almost a half million views as of Saturday morning.

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It was not clear who filed the copyright lawsuit about the film, entitled “Healing Not Hate,” which includes pictures of protests protesting Floyd ‘s death and a voiceover of a speech by President Trump in which he says “George Floyd ‘s death was a significant tragedy.” 

Last month, Twitter applied labels to two of President Trump’s tweets, one using the phrase “when the looting begins, the shooting begins” for “glorifying violence” and another for being “potentially misleading” about mail-in votes. Trump later issued an executive order governing how to moderate content on websites.