Twitter placed a fact-checking label on claims made by the the commander in chief, setting off a political firestorm.
In a first, a “get the facts” alert now appears underneath tweets sent out by President Trump on Tuesday in which he asserted mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.
Clicking on the link, which is marked with an exclamation point, leads the user to news articles fact-checking the claim along with Twitter’s own summary at the top, which states that the president’s assertions are “unsubstantiated” according to multiple news outlets.
The tweets in question specifically target mail-in ballots being used in California during the coronavirus pandemic.
“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” Trump said. “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”
Twitter applies fact-checking label to Trump tweet about mail-in ballots, after declining to remove his unfounded tweets about a former Scarborough aide’s death earlier today. pic.twitter.com/VziCb2iLIB
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) May 26, 2020
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order this month that would give every registered voter in the state a mail-in ballot to protect them from contracting and spreading the coronavirus in person.
A Twitter representative said Trump’s mail-in ballot tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”
“This decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month,” the spokesperson added in a statement given to reporters.
The Trump campaign said the move showed “clear political bias” by the tech giant.
“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” said Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility. There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them.”
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, asked if Twitter will start “censoring & fact-checking all the numerous blue check mark ‘journalists’ & leftwing activists who falsely claimed that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government & that [President Trump] is a ‘puppet’ of Putin for the past 4 years?”
Twitter has tinkered with its policies throughout the pandemic to crack down on misinformation about the coronavirus. It issued warnings based on the severity of the falsehood, with the biggest hoaxes possibly being subject for removal. Up until now, Trump had not been affected by these changes.
Earlier in the day, Twitter said it was “deeply sorry” about tweets in which Trump pushed a conspiracy theory regarding the death of a staffer who worked in Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough’s former congressional office in the early 1990s. But the platform declined to delete the missives even after the widower of that staffer, Lori Klausutis, pleaded with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove them.
