Hmm: Twitter Flags Detroit News's Endorsement of John James's Senate Campaign Without Explanation

(AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

As I do every day when I log on to the computer, I checked my Twitter lists this morning first thing to see what was hot and happening.

It wasn’t long before I saw the Detroit News’s tweet announcing they had endorsed Republican John James’s Senate campaign over incumbent Democrat Gary Peters:

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I wanted to retweet the news because I thought it was a pretty big deal, especially considering only one Republican has won a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan since 1979. Plus, though James has run a strong campaign, posting solid fundraising numbers, staying on the attack, and keeping things within striking distance of Peters, any extra push helps.

But when I went to retweet the editorial, this happened:

Unlike what happened with the New York Post last week, it still gave me the option to post a quote retweet in this instance. But I found the abnormal impediment to being able to post a simple RT more than a little tedious and unnecessary. Why label an endorsement from a major American newspaper as having a headline that didn’t “tell the full story”?

Perhaps I wouldn’t be so suspicious of Twitter’s adding a layer of red tape to retweeting the endorsement had they not broken their own rules over the weekend on the issue of posting manipulated media by allowing a fake news attack against James by the Peters campaign to stand without warnings or any flagging of the tweets they posted.

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Plus, Twitter is still flagging stories by the New York Post as not telling “the full story”, either:

This is all in addition to Twitter’s throttling of a Republican fundraising website, in contrast to how they treated a similar site on the Democratic side:

In any event, I was told that at some point later in the morning, though they posted no explanation for their initial flagging of the endorsement, Twitter had stopped issuing the warning on the paper’s endorsement tweet of James, something that may or may not have occurred due to complaints.

As to the endorsement itself, it was James’s second in two years from the paper – the first one coming in 2018 when he ran a surprisingly close campaign against Sen. Debbie Stabenow. This one had to be a bit of a sting for Peters, however, as the paper endorsed him in 2014.

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Of James, here’s what the Detroit News editorial board wrote:

“This is the right moment for John James,” the editorial board wrote. “He is waging his campaign at a time when America is trying to work through its long history of racial animus. As an African American, a conservative, and a Republican, James would add an important perspective to policy-making aimed at vanquishing racial inequity.”

[…]

“Peters is one of 73 white males in the Senate. It’s a demographic that’s well represented,” the endorsement read. “Clearly, the Senate would benefit from more Black voices as it addresses this national crisis, as would the Republican Party. The GOP can’t survive as a whites-only institution. Nor can the racial divide close if only one party represents the interests of Black Americans.”

James, of course, was happy with to hear of the endorsement at this critical time in the campaign with just two short weeks to go:

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Keep this race on your “one to watch” list on election night.

Related –>> Michigan Senate Candidate John James Explains How Sen. Gary Peters and Joe Biden Have Failed Black Community

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