Twitter bans pro-Trump ‘racist baby’ meme maker for copyright violations

Logan Cook, a Kansas man who posts under the name Carpe Donktum, was permanently banned from the platform days after he posted a video criticising CNN that used doctored footage from the news channel.

The clip, which Mr Trump retweeted last week, used footage from a CNN story from last year about the friendship of two toddlers, one black and one white.

Mr Cook doctored the clip, set it to ominous music, and inserted a fake misspelled CNN caption reading “Terrified todler runs from racist baby,” then a clip from the original video before showing the message “America is not the problem. Fake news is the problem.”

Twitter later placed a “manipulated media” warning label on the clip.

In a statement posted online, Mr Cook denied violating Twitter’s copyright rules and said he is being censored.

Mr Cook’s account has been temporarily suspended multiple times in the past for violations of Twitter’s copyright rules. He was also suspended for eight days last year for posting a video depicting Mr Trump as a cowboy attacking CNN journalist Jim Acosta.

Twitter rules prohibit Mr Cook from creating a new account to replace the old one, which had more than 270,000 followers at the time of the suspension.

Mr Trump often retweeted Mr Cook, who had emerged as a prominent creator of right-wing memes that uses humour, often dark, to condemn journalists and those who have criticised the president. Mr Trump called Mr Cook a “genius” during a meeting last year at the White House.

Mr Trump has himself run afoul of Twitter’s rules. In March the platform placed the “manipulated media” warning on a video of Joe Biden shared by Mr Trump.

Last month, Mr Trump lashed out at the company after it added fact-check warnings to two of his tweets about mail-in voting. Following that, the president vowed to add new regulations to rein in social media companies – an idea dismissed by constitutional law experts as legally difficult.