President Trump took to Twitter early Wednesday to rail against social media companies, escalating a battle with Twitter over using a fact-check label on his tweets for the first time this week.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” Trump tweeted. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that …. happen again.”
He threatened in a later tweet regarding Twitter that there was “Big action to follow!”
Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
The president’s response came after Twitter on Tuesday slapped a fact-check label on Trump’s tweets for the first time, a response to long-standing criticism that the company is too hands-off when it comes to policing misinformation and falsehoods from world leaders.
The move, which escalates tensions between Washington and Silicon Valley in an election year, was in response to two Trump tweets over the past 24 hours. The tweets falsely claimed mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Twitter’s label says, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” and redirects users to news articles about Trump’s unsubstantiated claim.
The tweets, said Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough, “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”
The label directs users to articles by CNN, The Washington Post and the Hill, along with selections from the articles and a page summarizing the findings of fact-checkers.
Twitter’s actions come as Silicon Valley companies are trying to show how they are prepared to tackle abuse ahead of a consequential presidential election. But they also play into Trump’s election-year agenda, in which he already has started railing against alleged bias by social media companies.
Last year, congressional committees held hearings on the subject, and Trump has hosted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the White House to complain he was losing followers. (He has 80.3 million.) The Department of Justice is also investigating some tech giants over potential abuses of market power.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump was considering creating a White House panel that would examine complaints of bias against conservatives on social media and other online platforms.
Trump and his surrogates have some of the most popular accounts on social platforms but frequently protest that the social media companies censor their voices. The reality is far more complicated: Twitter has been cracking down on spam accounts far more aggressively in recent years, a move that has affected liberals and conservatives alike.
While the leadership and rank and file of tech companies tend to lean liberal — Dorsey himself is a proponent of left-leaning causes such as the Black Lives Matter movement — Silicon Valley leaders also say platforms should not intervene too strongly in content decisions, lest they risk losing a legal status that protects them from being held responsible for illegal content on their sites.
Trump on Wednesday again tweeted his claims regarding mail-in ballots.
“Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!”
During its 14-year existence, Twitter has allowed misinformation by world leaders and everyday citizens to spread virtually unchecked. Its leaders have long said users would engage in debate on the platform and correct false information on their own.
But Trump has made many false claims on social media, particularly on his preferred medium of Twitter, and also has attacked people in ways critics have argued could violate company policies on harassment and bullying.
Twitter faced a barrage of criticism earlier Tuesday over another set of Trump tweets. The widower of a former staffer to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough asked Dorsey to delete tweets by Trump furthering a baseless conspiracy theory about the staffer’s wife’s death. Those tweets are still up, a reflection of social media companies’ approach to policing content that can appear inconsistent even as they have stepped up their enforcement.
Twitter is debating whether to take action on the Scarborough tweets, said a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Its much larger rival Facebook, by contrast, launched a fact-checking program several years ago. Facebook funds an army of third-party fact-checkers to investigate content, which then gets labeled on the site and demoted in its reach. However, Trump posted the same content about mail-in ballots on Facebook.
Facebook said it didn’t plan to label or remove the post. “We believe that people should be able to have a robust debate about the electoral process, which is why we have crafted our policies to focus on misrepresentations that would interfere with the vote,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said.
Twitter, which has roughly 330 million users compared to Facebook’s 2.6 billion, has not had the resources or the institutional will to engage fact-checkers.
