Twitter Deleting Tweets About United Airlines? Users Complain Of Censorship, But May Be Mistaken

Following the release of several videos that showed United Airlines forcibly removing a passenger (David Dao) from a flight, the company took a considerable amount of criticism online —especially on Twitter. Some of those negative tweets have disappeared, according to users.

Instances of users complaining that Twitter removed content critical of United Airlines have popped up in the wake of the event, which generated hundreds of thousands of tweets over the course of Monday.

Read: United Airlines Stock Falls Amid Passenger Controversy And CEO Response

Author Jay Beecher said on Twitter that two tweets of his—one critical of United, and later one suggesting Twitter had removed his original criticism —had been removed from his timeline. He was joined by a chorus of other users issuing similar complaints.

However, it appears those complaints are unfounded in the case of Beecher. His tweets are still present on his timeline, albeit only visible when the timeline view is set to display both tweets and replies, as both reportedly deleted tweets were replies to other tweets.

Beecher retweeted other users who claimed to experience the same issue, having critical comments wiped from their page. One of the users Beecher retweeted, @adirtyhippieee, said a tweet about United and airline monopolies was deleted—an event the user wondered was an “example of the #DeathOfTwitter.”

A few hours later, @adirtyhippieee noted that the tweet wasn’t actually deleted, just hidden in replies rather than the primary feed. “#FalseAlarm. It wasn't deleted after. Just poor searching on my part. My #apologies to @Twitter,” the user tweeted.

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The same exercise can be repeated again and again on a number of users who claim to have had tweets deleted. In most cases those tweets are replies and require an extra click to find, but have not be deleted or censored.

Twitter does ask users to remove content that is in violation of its rules, and has a number of ways that it can hide potentially offensive material from other users, including hiding content from everyone but a user’s followers and issuing temporary suspensions.

However, it would be strange for Twitter to only target specific tweets about the United Airlines case when the site not only hosted a number of videos displaying uncensored footage of the United passenger being dragged off the plane—including a bloody images of the passenger after his interaction with security.

Twitter even created an official Moment for the occurrence, which included footage of the incident and critical commentary of the airlines.

Beecher has since claimed that he reposted the same tweet multiple times until Twitter stopped deleting them. It does appear on Beecher’s timeline that he made the same post on multiple occasions, but all of them are intact on his feed.

It’s possible Twitter restored the tweets after a number of complaints, but given that most people claiming to have had tweets about United deleted appear to have simply lost track of the tweets because they are replies, it’s also possible the same mistake plagued Beecher.

Even if there is no active censorship taking place, Twitter does have a share of blame to take for the problem. The confusion may stem from recent changes to Twitter's platform, which many users have complained makes it harder to identify replies and threaded conversations.

Twitter declined to comment on the record for this story.