The Daily Wire
Case #
5529

Twitter censors The Daily Wire tweet that included What Is A Woman Documentary, later unrestricted it:

In late May 2023, The Daily Wire announced that it would begin streaming all of its podcast shows directly on Twitter, calling it "the largest free speech platform in the world." Subsequently, Jeremy Boreing, Co-CEO of The Daily Wire, explained in a Twitter thread that the outlet decided to stream host Matt Walsh's documentary What Is A Woman free for 24 hours on Twitter to celebrate it's one-year anniversary. Boreing continued, stating that the company was informed by a Twitter employee after a required pre-screening that the platform "would no longer provide us any support and would actually limit the reach of the film and label it as 'hateful conduct' because of 'misgendering'" found in two clips in the movie.

According to Boreing, the media outlet reminded the Twitter representative that the platform had recently removed its so-called "misgendering" policy. Boreing reported that the Twitter representative responded that the platform had "only removed 'misgendering' from [its] policy because [it] didn't need to be that specific, but that [it] still consider[s] 'misgendering' abuse and harassment." After declining to edit the film to accommodate this alleged infraction, The Daily Wire was reportedly told by the Twitter staff that the platform would ensure that The Daily Wire's "own followers would not be able to see it in their feeds. This, [Twitter] said, is part of [its] 'speech not reach' policy." 

Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk responded to Boreing's tweet thread, saying that "[t]his was a mistake by many people at Twitter. It is definitely allowed. Whether or not you agree with using someone's preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws." It is unclear what Musk was referring to, however, and Boreing even noted that his team was "trying to reach [Musk's] team to determine what this means for those posts, whether or not our event tonight will be allowed to proceed unencumbered, and whether or not we will be allowed to purchase the live event page and reach block as originally agreed."

Later on the evening of June 1, 2023, The Daily Wire tweeted the full video as planned to find that it was censored within minutes of being posted. The Daily Wire tweet read "It's the movie they really don't want you to see: #WhatIsAWoman? Watch the explosive documentary starring @MattWalshBlog FREE on Twitter for 24 hrs." The full 95 minute long movie was embedded in the tweet. Twitter rapidly placed an interstitial on the tweet that read "Visibility limited: this Tweet may violate Twitter's rules against Hateful Conduct." When a user clicked through the interstitial to view the tweet, the same label was placed above the tweet. Additionally, user's were unable to reply, re-tweet, quote-tweet, like, bookmark or share the tweet. 

Musk claimed that the video should not be restricted, but that it would not "be recommended to non-followers (nor will any advertising be associated with it)." Within several hours, the restrictions were removed, and Musk himself tweeted the video out to all of his 140 million followers with a note that "Every parent should watch this."

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