Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) is claiming that Twitter censored him because he got an error message while trying to send a tweet praising Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
His claims don’t hold much water though, because Cawthorn made the claims about being censored for trying to praise Abbott in a tweet that… praises Abbott. In a video attached to the tweet, Cawthorn said he was trying to tweet “Governor Abbott exemplifies state leadership.”
The congressman then goes on to claim that that he tried to send a tweet three times and was met with an error message that said “Something went wrong. But don’t fret, let’s give it another shot.”
Cawthorn points toward the screen, but it’s unclear what exactly the error message from Twitter says in the video. He doesn’t reveal it for some reason.
To try and prove his point, Cawthorn then closed the error message and tweeted out “testing” on Monday afternoon.
On Monday, Cawthorn quote-tweeted his “testing” tweet and claimed he was being censored for trying to praise Abbott (while also praising Abbott in the same tweet).
“Big-Tech is actively censoring my GOVERNMENT account as we speak. They will not allow me to praise @GovAbbott for his leadership in addressing the immigration crisis on our southern border. This is madness!” the lawmaker tweeted.
Twitter did not reply to a request for comment by the Daily Dot. However, the “something went wrong. But don’t fret, let’s give it another shot” error message is quite common. Numerous people online have posted about getting the message.
When Twitter had an outage in October last year, users got the same message when they tried to tweet.
Cawthorn’s gripes with “big tech” are nothing new—conservatives have long claimed that social media giants have a bias against them.
But the irony of Cawthorn claiming he was being censored in a tweet where he actually writes what he claims he’s being censored for wasn’t lost on people.