Twitter has “fact-checked” the president’s tweets and put them behind filters before, but now users themselves are blocked from showing their approval.
Twitter censored President Donald Trump’s October 26 tweet regarding "Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots," claiming it spread information about the election that "is disputed and might be misleading." In an unprecedented move, users cannot share or like the Tweet. When users click on the “Like” button, Twitter sends a pop-up explaining:
“We try to prevent a tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people, so we have disabled most of the ways to engage with it. If you want to talk about it, you can still Retweet with comment.”
Upon trying to retweet the post, Twitter sends another pop-up that requires the user to click through again to quote-tweet. The pop-up urges the following: “Learn how voting by mail is safe and secure.”
When users click through that pop-up to share it as a quote tweet, Twitter leaves a label beneath users’ posts by default. The label states: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process. Learn more.”
Essentially, Twitter has reduced Trump’s supporters from being able to endorse the tweet with “Likes,” and made it susceptible to being ratioed. Getting “ratioed” is Twitter slang for when a user is publicly humiliated on Twitter for having a Tweet receive more critical comments than likes because it ran afoul of the community at large. “Generally speaking, the more replies a tweet gets over likes or retweets, the worse it is,” Merriam-Webster’s Words We’re Watching blog explained.
Big Tech has a history of censoring Trump and fellow conservatives for critiquing vulnerabilities of mail-in voting. This trend arguably began when Trump was fact-checked by Twitter for condemning “Mail-In Ballots,” stating, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” this past May.
Twitter reportedly suspended Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Hogan Gidley for criticizing mail-in voting. Gidley had tweeted about “receiving an envelope in the mail that was addressed to someone else, by the name of ‘Daniel’” and criticized the integrity of mail-in voting, according to Fox News.
There are numerous examples of liberal outlets questioning the safety of mail-in voting during past elections. The New York Times wrote in 2012: “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show,” in an article headlined “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.”
Slate acknowledged in a 2016 piece headlined “Voter Fraud Exists. Republican Restrictions Won’t Stop It,” that “The vast majority of voter fraud prosecutions touted by conservative groups like [T]he Heritage Foundation involve absentee ballots that were illegally cast. And the only voting fraud schemes with the potential to actually swing elections involved mail-in ballots.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Twitter: (415) 222-9670, Facebook, Twitter or mail to 1355 Market Street Suite 900 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
