Twitter is not here for Donald Trump’s lies about mail-in ballots leading to widespread voter fraud, amending his tweets to include a note to “Get the facts” about mail-in ballots under each of the president’s problematic tweets about the issue.
On Tuesday morning, Trump was on one of his usual Twitter rants when he falsely claimed “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.”
“The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one,” he added. “This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”
Twitter highlighted the two tweets with an exclamation point, noting underneath “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” When the link is clicked, the user is directed to varying news reports (and tweets) which debunk the popular critique.
According to CNN, Twitter wanted to provide “context” to the comments, while noting they did not violate company policy as they did not explicitly discourage voting.
“These Tweets (here and here) contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough told the network in a statement. “This decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
That evening, Trump took to Twitter again to complain about Twitter “stifling FREE SPEECH.”
“.@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,” Trump wrote.