With less than two weeks to go before the election, the distributor of a pro-Trump documentary claims the film is being muzzled by Amazon and Facebook.
00:00If I were writing about the time frame that we lived in, that we're living in now, I would say it wasn't supposed to happen. They weren't supposed to know.
00:09With the election less than two weeks away, distributors of Amanda Milius' pro-Trump documentary, The Plot Against the President, claim that the film is getting the cold shoulder from Amazon and Facebook.
00:19Turnkey Films president and CEO Corey Tusek said that he submitted the documentary to Amazon on October 12th for streaming with a Prime account as well as for a rental or purchase through their website.
00:29He was notified on October 16th that it was under content review.
00:33In a statement, Corey Tusek said,
00:35We've never had an issue with a title getting blocked on Amazon to date.
00:39I think it is a little ironic that the first title we've ever had subjected to this happens to be a title that talks about media corruption, bias and censorship.
00:47I don't think it is a coincidence either that Amazon would block a title that sheds a favorable light on Donald Trump.
00:53This is the biggest political scandal in modern history, which makes Watergate look like a tiff.
01:00An Amazon spokesperson said the film is now available on the service after being held up for nearly two weeks.
01:06Milius stepped down in early March from her post as the deputy assistant secretary for content in the State Department Bureau of Global Public Affairs and began working on the dock in secrecy shortly after.
01:17The film is based on Lee Smith's 2019 bestseller of the same name.
01:21Milius said,
01:22If Amazon treated all political films equally, it wouldn't be an issue.
01:26But Amazon has a history of discreetly removing films that don't politically align with their agenda.
01:31Now it has decided to slow the release of the plot against the president.
01:34Meanwhile, Facebook rejected an ad for the film for potentially trying to interfere with elections.
01:40A Facebook spokesperson pointed The Hollywood Reporter to a policy that requires ads about social issues, elections or politics to take additional steps to be authorized.
01:49Documentary filmmakers on both ends of the political spectrum have started to complain about the censorship from tech giants, including Michael Moore, whose environmental documentary Planet of the Humans was removed from YouTube back in May.
02:02For more on this story, head to THR.com.
02:04For The Hollywood Reporter News, I'm Ashley Bellman, and I'll catch you later.
Be the first to comment