Twitter labels Trump's false claims with warning
for first time
President rails against decision after his tweets on
mail-in voting are marked with message: ‘Get the facts’
Some of Donald Trump’s tweets now feature a link
highlighting false claims.
Julia
Carrie Wong in San Francisco and Sam Levine in New York
Published
onWed 27 May 2020 01.02 BST
Twitter for the first time took action against a
series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and
providing a link to further information.
Since
ascending to the US presidency, Trump has used his Twitter account to threaten
a world leader with war, amplify racist misinformation by British hate figures
and, as recently as Tuesday morning, spread a lie about the 2001 death of a
congressional aide in order to smear a cable news pundit. Throughout it all,
Twitter has remained steadfast in its refusal to censor the head of state, even
going so far as to write a new policy to allow itself to leave up tweets by
“world leaders” that violate its rules.
The
company’s decision on Tuesday afternoon to affix labels to a series of Trump
tweets about California’s election planning is the result of a new policy
debuted on 11 May. They were applied – hours after the tweets initially went
out – because Trump’s tweets violated Twitter’s “civic integrity policy”, a
company spokeswoman confirmed, which bars users from “manipulating or
interfering in elections or other civic processes”, such as by posting
misleading information that could dissuade people from participating in an
election.
Trump
responded on Tuesday evening with a pair of tweets that repeated his false
claims about voting and accused Twitter of “interfering in the 2020
Presidential Election”. “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as
President, will not allow it to happen!” he wrote. Federal law protects the
rights of internet platforms to moderate the third-party speech they publish.
Trump’s
tweets include numerous false statements about California’s plan to expand
access to voting by mail in November due to the coronavirus outbreak. The
tweets now feature a light blue exclamation point icon, with the message “Get
the facts about mail-in ballots”. The alert label may not be visible when the
tweets are embedded in another web page, such as below.
Clicking on
the alert will link users to a “Twitter-curated page” that variously describes
Trump’s claims as “unsubstantiated” and false. The Twitter page also aggregates
tweets from a number of journalists and publications explaining why Trump’s
statements are false.
Trump’s
claims about California on Tuesday were blatantly wrong. The state is not
sending a ballot to anyone who lives in the state but rather those registered
there. Sam Mahood, a spokesman for the secretary of state, Alex Padilla, said
in an email only active voters in the state would be mailed ballots.
As states
prepare for an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting because of the Covid-19
pandemic, Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that this will lead to
fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare and one analysis found just 143
convictions involving mail-in ballot fraud since 2000, representing 0.00006% of
the ballots cast during that time period.
Trump, who
voted by mail in Florida in March, has made it clear that he opposes any effort
to make it easier to vote by mail for all eligible voters, including sending an
absentee ballot application to all voters, a measure the Republican National
Committee does not oppose. In March, he said Democratic efforts in Congress to
expand mail-in voting would make it so “you’d never have a Republican elected
in this country again”. Studies have shown neither Democrats nor Republicans
benefit from a switch to a vote-by-mail system.
Trump also
attacked efforts to increase mail-in voting in Michigan and Nevada last week.
He falsely said Michigan was sending absentee ballots to all registered voters;
in fact the state was only sending an absentee ballot application. Trump later
deleted his tweet and reposted a new one accusing the secretary of state of
unlawfully sending the applications, something the secretary of state says is
well within her authority.
Trump’s
campaign manager, Brad Parscale, lambasted Twitter’s decision in a statement,
framing it as an attempt by “Silicon Valley” to “obstruct and interfere with
President Trump getting his message through to voters”. Parscale also asserted
that Twitter’s “clear political bias” was a reason that the Trump campaign
pulled its advertising from Twitter “months ago”.
Twitter
banned all political advertising in November 2019, more than six months ago. At
the time, Parscale decried the global policy change as “another attempt by the
left to silence Trump and conservatives”.
Experts on
misinformation raised questions about whether Twitter’s measure would be
effective. Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the
American Democracy Project, noted that the “Get the facts” phrasing could
further entrench misinformation with its “legitimizing tone”.
“Get the
facts implies there is a debate where facts are being marshalled in evidence,”
he wrote on Twitter. “It elevates the claim.”
Claire
Wardle, the director of First Draft News, also questioned whether Twitter’s
information page would be effective in changing any minds.
“If we are
to consider the reasoning behind this, it’s not a belief that this will change
anyone’s minds, it’s to provide necessary context to a tweet that should be
taken down, but if they did that would lead to more conspiratorial thinking,”
she said. “They’re stuck between a rock and hard place.”
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