Twitter Inc has disabled a campaign-style video that President Donald Trump retweeted, citing a copyright complaint.
The video, which included music from the group Linkin Park, vanished from the President’s Twitter feed late on Saturday.
As the late Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, who committed suicide in 2017 after battling alcohol and drugs, had branded Trump “a greater threat to the USA than terrorism,” the band’s surviving members were quick to file the takedown notice with Twitter.
Within hours, Twitter obliged the band’s request, pulling the video from Trump’s feed and replacing it with a message that reads, “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”
While the Trump ad can no longer be seen on Twitter, it was still available on YouTube as of Sunday afternoon.
Trump had retweeted the ad from White House social media director Dan Scavino.
Twitter received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice from Machine Shop Entertainment, the management company owned by the rock band Linkin Park.
“We respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorised representatives,” a Twitter representative said in an email statement.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Twitter began challenging Trump’s tweets in May and has repeatedly clashed with him since. The social media company has several times disabled or commented on tweets by the President because of what it said were copyright complaints or violations of a policy against threatening violence.
Twitter removed an image the president tweeted on June 30, which included a picture of Trump, because of a complaint from the New York Times, whose photographer shot the image.
The company also put a Trump tweet behind a warning label in late May, saying that he had violated its rules against “glorifying violence” when he advocated that Minneapolis authorities be tough in responding to protests over the death of George Floyd.
-AAP