Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning claiming that “mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent” and would result in “a rigged election”.
Washington| In first such instance, microblogging site Twitter on Tuesday labelled two tweets from the US President Donald Trump as “potentially misleading” for making false statements about mail-in voting. The move is considered significant because Twitter has fact-checked the US President for the first time.
Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning claiming that “mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent” and would result in “a rigged election”. Twitter imposed the label on these two tweets. Trump’s tweet was targeted at California’s efforts to expand mail-in voting in the wake of Covid-19 outbreak. The California governor was sued by Republican National Committee on Sunday for the state’s move to expand mail-in voting.
According to a Twitter spokesperson, the labelled tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labelled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265255835124539392?s=20
At the top pf the fact-check page, Twitter has written, “Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election.’ However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”
A Twitter spokesperson defended the move saying it is in accordance with the new policy introduced by the company a few days ago to limit “the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content” related to the pandemic.
Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, responded to the move by Twitter saying, “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact-checkers’ is only a smokescreen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.”
Trump also hit back at Twitter 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.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265427538140188676?s=20
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