Republicans accused Twitter of election interference Tuesday after the company temporarily muted the account of Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona GOP, with just days left until the state’s primary election.
Ms. Ward had her Twitter privileges briefly suspended after sharing a controversial video in violation of the social media service’s rule against spreading misinformation about the novel coronavirus.
Along with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Ms. Ward was among verified Twitter users “temporarily limited” for sharing the video clip, briefly pausing their ability to post on the platform.
Recorded on Monday, the video showed Stella Immanuel, a self-described primary care physician from Houston, Texas, falsely claiming a cure exists for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Ms. Ward shared an email she received from Twitter after posting the video informing her that her account had been limited for violating its “policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”
“Under this policy, we require the removal of content that may pose a risk to people’s health, including content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information,” according to Twitter.
Ms. Ward and the Arizona Republican Party she chairs were each quick to respond by accusing Twitter of interfering in the state’s primary election scheduled to take place exactly one week later on August 4.
Greg Safsten, the executive director of the Arizona GOP, said that briefly preventing the state party’s chair from tweeting “hinders our ability to communicate with voters, encourage Arizonans to get out vote [sic], and silences an important conservative voice in our state.”
“Twitter and the rest of #BigTech is not even hiding the fact that they are partnering with the mainstream media and the Democrats to tip the scale in the 2020 election,” Ms. Ward complained on Facebook, where she also shared the same video. “Social media companies having the ability to #censor opinions with which they disagree is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.”
Twitter did not immediately return a message requesting comment on their complaints.
Several online platforms, including both Twitter and Facebook, among others, took steps to try to stop the spread of the video shared by Ms. Ward after it was posted online Monday and quickly went viral.
President Trump notably promoted the video from his Twitter account Monday by sharing a clip that claimed a “cure” exists for COVID-19.
Scientists are working to develop an effective treatment for the infectious respiratory disease, which has infected millions of people worldwide since being discovered late last year in Wuhan, China.
