Twitter, Facebook remove Trump campaign videos due to copyright complaint – CNET [CNET]

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President Donald Trump’s video tribute to George Floyd was removed from Twitter due to a copyright claim.

Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Twitter pulled video tributes to George Floyd from a pair of tweets posted by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign on Thursday due to a copyright complaint, as previously reported by Politico. They were from the @TeamTrump and @TrumpWarRoom accounts.

“Per our copyright policy, we respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorized representatives,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement, but didn’t say who made the complaint.

In a followup tweet, the Trump campaign accused Twitter and CEO Jack Dorsey of “censoring” Trump’s “uplifting and unifying message.” Last month, Trump signed an executive order designed to curtail legal protections for social media companies after Twitter labeled two of his tweets for containing “potentially misleading information.”

The nearly four-minute-long video, in which footage from recent days plays as Trump pays tribute to Floyd and criticizes “antifa and other radical leftwing groups” for the unrest seen across the US.

Facebook and its photo service Instagram also removed the same video because of a copyright complaint.

“We received a copyright complaint from the creator under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and have removed the post. Organizations that use original art shared on Instagram are expected to have the right to do so,”a Facebook spokesman said in a statement.

The video, though, is still available on Google-owned YouTube.

Antifa, short for anti-fascists, is an overarching description of far-left militant groups that confront white supremacists and neo-Nazis at rallies and other events. Last Sunday, Trump tweeted that the US would designate antifa a terrorist organization. However, legal specialists have said antifa isn’t an actual organization.

See also: How to find quoted replies and retweets on Twitter: Try this 10-second trick