Twitter has started fact-checking Donald Trump
by Agency Staff
A pair of Donald Trump’s tweets that made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting were appended on Tuesday with links pointing readers to news stories fact-checking him, as Twitter faces increasing criticism for not policing the president’s activity on its site.
The two tweets, which Trump sent on Tuesday, now carry prominent links reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots”. The links take readers to a page with a collection of stories and reporters’ tweets about the president’s unsubstantiated claims, as well as an item apparently authored by Twitter staff titled “What you need to know” that rebuts the president.
“Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to ‘a Rigged Election’,” the Twitter-authored item reads. “However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.”
Twitter confirmed it had added the fact-checking links to Trump’s tweets.
“These tweets contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labelled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” the company said in a statement. “This decision is in line with the approach we shared earlier this month.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier on Tuesday, the New York Times published a letter written by a man whose wife died in former congressman Joe Scarborough’s office, asking Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to remove tweets Trump posted encouraging a baseless conspiracy theory that Scarborough murdered the woman, Lori Klausutis.
Twitter issued a statement apologising for the pain Trump’s tweets caused Klausutis’s family but did not say whether the tweets would be removed. — Reported by Alex Wayne and Kurt Wagner, (c) 2020 Bloomberg LP