Reversing course, Twitter has started labeling some false statements
tweeted by President Trump as “potentially misleading.”
On Tuesday, for example, Trump tweeted: “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially
fraudulent.”
Along with a blue exclamation point, Twitter is accompanying Trump’s tweet with the statement: “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which links to a
CNN report about the President making unsubstantiated claims about mail-in ballots.
In a statement, Twitter explained these tweets “contain potentially misleading information about
voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”
The decision comes amid a growing backlash over
Twitter’s unwillingness to police Trump’s more outrageous tweets.
This week, both the New York Post’s editorial board and The New York Times columnist Kara
Swisher took issue with Trump's tweeting of baseless theories that MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough murdered a woman in 2001.
Personalizing the debate, the
woman’s widower just wrote a letter
to Twitter cofounder-CEO Jack Dorsey requesting that he take down Trump’s offending tweets.
As of Tuesday, Dorsey had yet to address the controversy directly.
On Tuesday,
Twitter released a statement saying that it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”
Twitter also said it has
been working to “expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”
Twitter has long maintained that prominent figures like Trump are largely exempt from its content policies, because their tweets are of historical significance and often in the "public
interest."
Without addressing Twitter’s new labeling process directly, Trump issued< /a> a thinly disguised threat to the company on Wednesday morning.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” Trump
tweeted.
“We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more
sophisticated version of that.... happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of
Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!”