Trump Accuses Twitter Of “Interfering” In the 2020 Presidential Election For Calling His Tweets “Potentially Misleading”

Report By Nandika Chand | Kashmir Srinagar | Last Updated at May 27 2020

Twitter, the social media platform that helps world leaders reach out to the voters, has for the first time called out US President Donald Trump’s tweets as “potentially misleading”. The social network said his claims about mail-in ballouts had been debunked by fact checkers.

Trump, in turn, lashed out at Twitter and accused the platform of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling free speech”. Brad Parscale, manager of Trump’s re-election campaign, said this was expected. “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. Partnering with 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,” he said.

Twitter took this stance after Trump posted two tweets on Tuesday morning wherein he falsely claimed that mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent and would result in a rigged election. The social network’s spokesperso Katie Rosborough said the tweets contain potentially misleading information about voting processes. She said it has been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.

“Fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” Rosborough said. She added that the decision is in line with the approach Twitter had shared earlier this month. The spokesperson also confirmed that this marks the first instance in which the social network has labeled any Trump’s tweet as potentially misleading.

However, some users faulted Twitter for not explicitly saying in the label that Trump’s tweets contained false information. Others said the platform should have used a larger font size.