Trump vs Twitter in mail-in ballot brouhaha

Much has been made about the role of social media in politics, and that was in all caps on Tuesday as Twitter contested US President Donald Trump's exhortations about mail-in election ballots, a voting trend magnified by the coronavirus pandemic.

For the first time, Twitter prompted readers to fact-check Trump's tweets about mail-in ballots.

Twitter's blue exclamation mark suggested readers "get the facts about mail-in ballots" and directed them to a page with news articles and information about the claims aggregated by staffers of the San Francisco-based company.

Trump tweeted back on Tuesday evening that "@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.... Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!"

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon Inc.

Trump, who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter, tweeted earlier in the day that mail-in ballots would be "substantially fraudulent" and result in a "rigged election". He also singled out California Governor Gavin Newsom, although the state is not the only one that uses mail-in ballots.

Trump and many conservative politicians and commentators have long accused social media companies of stifling their voices in favor of Democrats. They also have expressed concerns about "ballot harvesting" in the mail-in election process, contending that some votes are not properly awarded to a particular candidate.

Trump has long relied on Twitter to get his message out to supporters and voters and has regularly accused US mainstream media of unfair coverage.

"Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud," said a headline at the top of the page, followed by a "what you need to know" section correcting three false or misleading claims made in the tweets.

Twitter confirmed that it was the first time it had applied a fact-checking label to a tweet by the president, in an extension of its new "misleading information" policy introduced this month to challenge misinformation about the coronavirus.

The company said then that it would later extend the policy to other topics.

"We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters," Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. "Partnering with the biased fake news media 'fact checkers' is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility."

In an email to politico.com, Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough said that Trump's tweets on the mail-in ballots "contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context".

Twitter's move came hours after the company declined to take action on insinuating tweets Trump sent about the 2001 death of a former congressional staff member, after her widower asked the company to remove them.

The woman, who reportedly had a heart condition, was a staff member for former US Republican congressman Joe Scarborough of Florida, now a prominent MSNBC host and frequent critic of the president. She was found dead of a head injury in Scarborough's office in Fort Walton Beach.

The woman's widower asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a letter last week to take down the president's tweets that suggested Scarborough was involved in her death.

Twitter said in a statement that the company is "deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family." But the company said it would not be removing the posts.

A Twitter spokesman told Reuters that the difference was that the later Trump tweets were related to election integrity.

Reuters contributed to this story.