Twitter became the second social media giant to temporarily block a California Republican House candidate's campaign video this week before reversing itself after she balked.
Republican Elizabeth Heng is challenging Rep. Jim Costa (D., Calif.) in California's majority-Hispanic 16th Congressional District in Fresno. The 33-year-old daughter of Cambodian refugees who survived Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, she used images of the brutal killings perpetrated by the regime in a four-minute campaign video.
Heng uses the story of her parents' decision to marry before ever speaking to each other to escape death at the Khmer Rouge's hands as an example of how "great things come from great adversity."
However, like Facebook did earlier this month, Twitter blocked the video on Thursday, saying the images were "offensive, vulgar, or obscene." Ater Heng spoke to the media about the ban, Twitter changed its mind. Heng said in an email she would fight for "internet transparency" in Congress, GVWire.com reports:
"We had momentarily rejected the ad for breaking our Inappropriate Content policy," a company spokesperson told GV Wire. "(We) can confirm that we reverted this decision, and the ad is no longer banned."
Heng, running against incumbent Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno), says this is evidence of a concerted effort to silence her.
"In the past few weeks Facebook and Twitter have been called out by conservatives for deliberately shutting down conservative voices as evidenced in multiple cases," Heng said in an email statement. "Unfortunately, the tech companies are holding the all of the power and have no apparent desire to correct biased censorship of their platforms. When I’m elected I’ll fight for internet transparency, so that every American has a chance to be heard."
Facebook did the same thing to Heng's ad on Aug. 3, saying the images at the start of the video were too violent. Heng said it didn't have the right to silence her story, and she tied the decision to do so to a pattern of tech companies censoring Republicans.
"Neither Facebook nor any other company in the tech industry get to silence our stories," she said at the time. "We’ve seen it over and over again with Republican candidates and organizations. This kind of censorship is an attack on the freedoms that we have as Americans to express what we believe in, and we must hold Facebook accountable."
Facebook restored the ad on Aug. 7 and said in a statement that "it is clear the video contains historical imagery relevant to the candidate’s story."
Heng faces an uphill battle in the blue district where 45 percent of registered voters are Democrats against just 26 percent who are Republicans, and Costa has $1 million more cash on hand. However, she finished just six points behind in their two-person primary race in June.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) said Twitter's singling out of Heng was "appalling," and he has previously condemned what he describes as social media censorship of conservatives.
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that only one party is being slammed by censorship, over and over again. Twitter singling out conservatives like @ElizabethHeng is appalling. #StopTheBias https://t.co/1GqLCvkq0i
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) August 16, 2018