Twitter, Facebook Flags Trump Posts Ahead Of US Election

US President Donald Trump has had a couple of his posts flagged by both social networking platforms Twitter and Facebook.

Both platforms took action over Trump’s posts that claimed a US Supreme Court decision on mail-in voting in Pennsylvania would lead to “rampant” fraud and was “very dangerous”, Reuters reported.

This claim led to different actions by the two firms. Twitter for example hid the president’s tweet behind a label which said the content was “disputed” and “might be misleading.”

Social clashes

Trump’s tweet also said the Supreme Court’s decision would “induce violence in the streets.”

Facebook on the other hand added a disclaimer to Trump’s post, which had been shared 4,200 times, saying that voting by mail and voting in person have a “history of trustworthiness” in the United States, with voter fraud being extremely rare.

Facebook also reportedly labelled a Fox News video posted by Trump in which he talked about “cheating” in Pennsylvania with the same message.

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.

Fact-checking

It began when Twitter had placed fact-checking labels on a couple of his tweets for the first time in late May, when President Trump made unsubstantiated claims that postal voting would lead to widespread fraud.

Twitter then also hid tweets from Trump and the official White House account when they tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. It hid those tweets saying they were “glorifying violence”.

Twitter also reacted when Trump tweeted about US protesters and he threatened “serious force” against them in the American capital city.

In response Trump signed an executive order against social networking firms, that seeks to “remove or change” a provision of a law known as section 230 that shields social media companies from liability for content posted by their users.