Politics

Twitter raises Trump’s ire after fact-checking his posts

Washington DC, May 26 (efe-epa).- United States President Donald Trump has said that he will not allow Twitter to interfere with his freedom of expression as it fact-checked the content of his posts and applied a “get the facts” alert to them for the first time on Tuesday.

“@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 said on Twitter.

“Twitter,” he added, “is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”

For the first time on Tuesday, Twitter linked messages from Trump with verified information that contradicted what the president had published, a procedure on the social network that until now had not been applied to the president.

The alerts came after Trump wrote posts in which he said voting by mail in the US presidential election in November would inevitably have a “substantially fraudulent” outcome and would lead to a “rigged election.”

The president was reacting to the decision of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to mail ballots to all registered voters in the state as an exceptional measure in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” was the message in blue and preceded by an exclamation point that Twitter embedded under Trump’s tweets.

By clicking on the alert, the social network redirects the user to another page within the platform where in bold letters it is written: “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”

Underneath the heading it says that “these claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”

The move is the result of a new policy that Twitter debuted on May 11 against “the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content.”

Twitter is Trump’s the most used social network, through which he communicates directly with his supporters without going through traditional media channels, and where he has more than 80 million followers. EFE-EPA

at-arc/tw

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