Twitter refuses to flag Jon Ossoff’s false accusation that ‘Kelly Loeffler campaigned with a Klansman’

Mary Margaret Olohan, DCNF

Twitter will not flag a tweet from Democratic Georgia Senate candidate Jon Ossoff falsely accusing Republican Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler of campaigning with “a klansman,” a Twitter spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday.
Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy told the DCNF that the tweet does not fit under any of Twitter’s three policies for misleading information: “synthetic and manipulated media, COVID-19, and Civic Integrity.”
“Making a claim about someone and their character wouldn’t fall under any of those policies,” Kennedy said.

Twitter will not flag a tweet from Democratic Georgia Senate candidate Jon Ossoff falsely accusing Republican Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler of campaigning with “a klansman,” a Twitter spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday.

Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy told the DCNF that the tweet does not fit under any of Twitter’s three policies for misleading information: “synthetic and manipulated media, COVID-19, and Civic Integrity.”

Kennedy said he did not even have Twitter teams review the Ossoff tweet due to the busyness of the holiday season. He explained to the DCNF that though the civic integrity category deals with elections, “making a claim about someone happens in political speech all the time.”

“Making a claim about someone and their character wouldn’t fall under any of those policies,” Kennedy said.

The DCNF pointed out that Ossoff’s statement falsely accuses Loeffler of campaigning with a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but the Twitter spokesman told the DCNF that Twitter is not going to be “the arbiter of truth,” as the company has often said.

This does not make us an “arbiter of truth.” Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.

— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020

“Kelly Loeffler campaigned with a klansman,” Ossoff tweeted Wednesday evening. His comment, which has gone viral on Twitter, apparently refers to a photo that Loeffler’s campaign has strongly condemned depicting Loeffler with white supremacist Chester Doles, a Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi National Alliance member, according to the AJC.

“Kelly had no idea who that was, and if she had she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for,” Loeffler’s campaign spokesman Stephen Lawson previously told the AJC regarding the photograph.

Lawson told the DCNF Thursday that Twitter should have flagged Ossoff’s tweet and taken it down since it’s “a blatant lie.”

“It’s not surprising coming from a pathological liar like Jon Ossoff whose parents still pay his rent,” Lawson added.

Twitter locked the New York post out if its twitter account on Oct. 15 after the NYP published a report on alleged emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that allegedly showed Hunter and his father, president-elect Joe Biden, met with an executive from the Ukranian gas company Burisma in 2015.

Twitter also censored the story on its platform, prevented users from tweeting or sending the link, and locked the accounts of a number of high-profile Twitter users, such as White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who attempted to post the link.

The company has previously defended its rationale for censoring information. During a late October hearing on Twitter’s moderation practices following Twitter’s decision to suspend the New York Post, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that Holocaust denials are not considered misinformation and said that Holocaust denials also do not fit under Twitter’s three categories of misinformation.

Twitter also repeatedly censored President Donald Trump’s tweets during the 2020 presidential election with the caption: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”

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