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- President Trump attacked mail-in voting once again on Monday, tweeting: “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.”
- Twitter placed a label and a fact-check link on the tweet, warning that it might be “misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process.”
- It also stopped other users from liking, retweeting, or replying to the tweet, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. The aim was to “significantly reduce the tweet’s visibility.”
- Twitter has previously placed fact-checks and misinformation warnings on tweets from Trump that claimed mail-in voting would be fraudulent, and that ballot drop-off boxes were “not COVID sanitized.”
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump has been fact-checked by Twitter. Again.
Trump tweeted about mail-in voting on Monday, claiming there were “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.”
Twitter, in response, placed a label above the tweet saying it “might be misleading,” wrote a fact-check below it about mail-in voting, and stopped other users from liking, retweeting, or replying to the tweet.
Over the course of his re-election campaign, Trump has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it is insecure or fraudulent, when historically mail-in voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
Twitter/Business Insider
Since June, Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits in seven states trying to block the expansion of vote-by-mail.
Clicking the "learn more" link on Twitter's warning takes users to Twitter's "Civic Integrity" policy page. "With this warning and in line with our Civic Integrity Policy, we will significantly reduce the tweet's visibility and people will not be able to like, reply or retweet it," a spokesperson told Business Insider.
Twitter also placed a fact-check below the tweet, taking users to a page entitled "Voting by mail is legal and safe, experts and data confirm."
Latest in a series of Twitter warnings about Trump's tweets
This is not the first time Twitter has slapped a warning on one of Trump's tweets about mail-in voting. In August, the social media company placed a "public interest notice" on a tweet that claimed, without evidence, that ballot drop-off boxes are both a "voter security disaster" and "not COVID sanitized."
A Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider at the time the platform had taken action because the tweet contained "misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting." The platform placed the same constraints stopping users from retweeting, liking, or replying to the tweet.
In May, the platform also placed a fact-check label on a series of tweets from Trump in which he claimed mail-in ballots will be "substantially fraudulent."
The decision appeared to enrage Trump, and two days later he signed an executive order aimed at constraining social media companies for allegedly discriminating against conservatives.
The order was broadly written to allow federal regulators to amend Section 230 of the the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the part of US law that gives internet companies the right to moderate what content is allowed on their platforms, as well as giving them legal protection from liability for user-generated content.
Although legal experts critiqued the order for being potentially unconstitutional, in September the Department of Justice submitted proposed re-tooling of the legislation to Congress, and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced on October 16 the FCC would "clarify the meaning" of the law.
Section 230 will be coming under even more intense scrutiny on Wednesday, as the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Google will be giving evidence to Congress about the law.