After years of Twitter users and Democratic politicians begging the social media giant to take action against President Donald Trump’s often dangerous and untruthful tweets, Twitter is finally taking a small but significant first step. As part of Twitter’s initiative to label tweets that contain false or misleading claims, the social media network flagged two of the president’s tweets that contained “potentially misleading” information about mail-in ballots. The move marked the first time Twitter has fact-checked the president’s tweets. “These Tweets…contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” Twitter said in a statement. “This decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
The flagged tweets—in which Trump falsely claims “there is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent”—are now marked with a label alerting users to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” When users click on the link, it takes them to a Twitter Moments page, which links to articles and tweets from journalists and experts that debunk Trump’s claims. The president’s statements about voter fraud “are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others,” the Twitter page notes. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.” A Twitter spokesperson told Recode the company was finally moved to take action against Trump’s tweets because of their focus on “what the company considers a key issue area of civic integrity and voting.” But the tweets were hardly the first time Trump has made false claims about mail-in voting, as he and his GOP allies have ramped up their attacks on the voting process in anticipation of a socially-distanced presidential election. Twitter did not address previous tweets in which Trump falsely claimed that mail-in voting is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and then targeted several states’ absentee voting practices on Twitter using false claims.
Trump and his team predictably freaked out at Twitter’s decision to actually hold the president accountable for once, with Trump declaring on Twitter that the social media network was “now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election.” “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” Trump tweeted. (These claims are, of course, also completely false.) White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany pushed out a Twitter thread on mail-in ballots, while Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement that Twitter’s move was evidence of their “clear political bias.” “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,” Parscale said. “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.” (Parscale also claimed that the Trump campaign had pulled their advertising from Twitter “months ago” partially because of its supposed partisanship, though in actuality Twitter itself banned all political advertisements on its platform back in October.)
Despite Trumpworld’s ire, Twitter’s actions beyond these two tweets show that they’re still not the public enemy of the president that Trump claims them to be. The fact-checked tweets came directly after Twitter refused to take action on Trump’s tweets regarding a baseless conspiracy theory involving Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, and the president has long had free rein to make false and dangerous claims on the platform without reprisal. As Bloomberg journalist Sarah Frier pointed out, the label Twitter used on the tweets doesn’t even sound like an overt warning that Trump’s claims are false, with the user having to click through to find out that what the president said has been debunked. The tweet-flagging is also far more minor than the steps Twitter has taken against other world leaders, as they’ve entirely removed tweets by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro touting unproven cures for COVID-19. (Trump’s tweets and retweets about hydroxychloroquine, an unproven COVID-19 treatment that some studies suggest may cause a higher risk of death, have gone unaddressed.)