Tight Presidential Election Sees Facebook, Twitter Act On ‘Victory’ Posts

Social networking giants Facebook and Twitter have clamped down on posts claiming victory from both US President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

As the world awaits the outcome of a very tight US Presidential election on Wednesday, both President Trump and Joe Biden claimed early victory, leading to a clampdown by social networking giants.

On Monday both platforms had took action over a couple of posts by President Trump that claimed a US Supreme Court decision on mail-in voting in Pennsylvania would lead to “rampant” fraud and was “very dangerous”.

Post clampdown

And now as the election result hangs in the balance, Donald Trump’s claim that his opponents “are trying to steal the election” was flagged by Twitter, which hid the post behind a warning label.

Facebook and Twitter have also reportedly suspended a number of accounts spreading election misinformation.

Facebook is also automatically flagging both posts from both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, warning readers that the votes are still being counted.

President Trump has been condemned after he took to television to falsely declare victory, a move that prompted Facebook to declare that it had placed notifications at the top of the timelines for all US users, explaining that the election had not yet been decided.

“Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected,” said Facebook. “We’re also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information.”

President Trump has been repeating the fraud warning about mail-in voting for some time now, along with misleading Coronavirus posts.

For the record, President Trump has been clashing with social networking firms since May this year, when a dispute erupted between Trump and Twitter.