Twitter Criticized by U.S. President Trump for Labeling His Social Media Posts as “Misleading”
Lindsay McCallum of Twitter said in an interview that President Donald Trump's two tweets about mail-in ballots could possibly contain "misleading information" with regards to the voting process. The company then labeled the unsubstantiated tweets to provide additional context about the mail-in ballots.
In the tweets, Trump said that Democrats were allegedly rigging the November elections by expanding mail-in voting across the United States, which they claimed was to enforce social distancing.
Twitter under scrutiny
Brad Parscale, campaign manager of Team Trump, wrote in a statement on Tuesday that they knew all along Silicon Valley would create obstructions and interferences with Trump getting his message across to American voters. He added that partnering with biased news media fact checkers was a "smoke screen" the company was using to gain a certain credibility to their political tactics, which was why the campaign pulled their advertising from Twitter.
The new prompt update allows Twitter users to open a fact-checking page that debunked the president's accusations, including a summary of the issue that gave context for the misleading posts and links to stories by news media sources. People did call out Twitter for their lack of using neutral language because they used polarizing terms like "incorrect" and "misleading".
In response to the company's decision to label his tweets, the president criticized Twitter for interfering with the 2020 presidential election. He then proceeded to reiterate his claims that mail-in voting was fraudulent. Twitter, however, chose not to take down Trump's tweets about Joe Scarborough's "cold case", since they believed it was not violative of their policies.
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Labels may not apply to high-profile accounts anymore
In the new update, Twitter introduced a system that hides certain tweets from users. The posts are hidden behind warnings that do not let other users see the replies because of the "propensity for harm" and the "type of misleading information" they may contain.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was contacted by the late congressional aide's widower Timothy Klausutis, who sent a letter that asked him to delete the president's tweets about his wife being murdered. He added that ordinary Twitter users would be banned from the social media platform for posting such a tweet, but he was only "asking that they be removed". Dorsey's decision was to not apply a label or warning to Trump's series of tweets regarding Scarborough's conspiracy, but he did say the company was planning on rolling in updates in the future that could mitigate harm in similar situations.
In a report by Tech Crunch, Twitter said its new label was still under development. Their purpose was to provide context on different kinds of "unverified claims'', which included rumors, as much as it was required. Even in the wake of COVID-19 misinformation and other such misconstrued allegations, Twitter has so far been hesitant on applying these labels to high-status accounts, especially that of Trump.
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