Twitter fact-checks Trump for the first time
Twitter has flagged some of President Donald Trump’s tweets with a fact-check warning for the first time.
Twitter has for the first time called out a tweet by Donald Trump, warning followers that his claims about mail-in ballots are false and have been debunked by fact-checkers.
In a tweet responding to the company’s move, the US President accused it of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” he said.
The blue exclamation mark notification put on the President’s tweet prompted readers to “get the facts about mail-in ballots” and directed them to a page with news articles and information about the claims aggregated by Twitter staff.
Mr Trump threatened last night (AEST) to shut down social media over Twitter’s actions in urging users to check facts.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices (sic). We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,” Mr Trump tweeted. “We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016.”
Mr Trump, who has more than 80 million Twitter followers, had claimed earlier in the day that mail-in ballots would be “substantially fraudulent” and result in a “rigged election”.
Twitter confirmed this was the first time it had applied a fact-checking label to a tweet by Mr Trump, in an extension of its new “misleading information” policy introduced to combat misinformation about the coronavirus.
Twitter’s fact-checking notification came hours after the social network turned down a plea from a widower to remove tweets in which Mr Trump insinuated the man’s wife had been murdered by a television presenter.
Mr Trump has repeatedly called for Joe Scarborough, 57, the host of a morning MSNBC show, to be investigated over the death of Lori Klausutis in 2001.
At the time, Scarborough was a Republican congressman and Klausutis, then 28, worked in his office in Florida. She was found dead on her back near a desk after suffering an abnormal heart rhythm and striking her head as she fell.
Foul play was not suspected. Scarborough was 1445km away in Washington at the time.
“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough,” Mr Trump tweeted last week. “So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair?”
On Saturday he wrote: “A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida … and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!”
On Wednesday (AEST), Timothy Klausutis, Lori’s widower, wrote to Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey asking him to delete Mr Trump’s tweets. “I am asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” he wrote.
Mr Klausutis, 52, argued that the tweets violated Twitter’s rules. “An ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform for such a tweet but I am only asking that these tweets be removed,” he wrote. Scarborough and his co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, read the letter out on their program. Twitter said it would not remove the tweets.
Reuters, The Times
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