Twitter has long threatened to label certain tweets from President Donald Trump. Now it finally has used the liberal media to fact-check his tweets.
A tweet from the president that discussed mail-in ballots was labeled as an “unsubstantiated claim” by Twitter. When Trump tweeted, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.” A bright blue sentence was added by the social media platform at the bottom of the tweet, which said “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” The label led to a Twitter Events page, which said, “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”
The statement continued, “These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”
Trump responded, saying, “@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post........Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”
“Misleading information is like the challenge of our industry right now,” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in an interview with Showtime hosts Desus Nice and The Kid Mero. In that same interview, Dorsey said that “Anything that we can do to interstitial a lot of this and provide context that is credible and might show a disagreement or a debate around the topic, I think, would be helpful.”
New York Post reporter Jon Levine found that Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth had tweets that showed his political bias against Trump and Republicans. One tweet from Roth said, “Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
A Twitter spokesperson linked Fox News to a tweet from Twitter VP of Communications Brandon Borrman that said: “No one person here is responsible for our polices or enforcement actions. People who decide to target one person for decisions they don't agree with know damn well what they're doing."
Previously, the Trump campaign had dealt with one of its pro-life videos being covered up with a filter, or interstitial, and labeled “sensitive content.”
Twitter apologized on May 26 to the family of a Joe Scarborough staffer, according to the Washington Examiner, because of a Trump tweet that hinted that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had something to do with the death of his staffer in 2001. “We've been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Examiner. While those tweets were not removed, the fact-check for the other tweet appeared on the same day.
The Chinese government has been allowed to push conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus unscathed on Twitter. A video from the Chinese Embassy in France spread myths about the source of coronavirus. In addition, Spokesperson & Deputy Director General, Information Department, Foreign Ministry of China Lijian Zhao tweeted, “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”
