The micro blogging site Twitter flagged four tweets from President Trump on Saturday morning for making “potentially misleading claims about an election,” a company spokesperson said, continuing its attempts to try to rein in misinformation on its platform.
The president tweeted, without evidence, that “tens of thousands of votes were illegally received after 8 P.M. on Tuesday, Election Day, totally and easily changing the results in Pennsylvania and certain other razor thin states.” He claimed thousands of votes were “illegally not allowed to be OBSERVED,” and said “bad things took place,” during a time when “LEGAL TRANSPARENCY was viciously & crudely not allowed.”
The platform labeled a fifth tweet where the president claimed he had won the election “by a lot” with the notice “official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted” and a link to news sources about the election.
Twitter also flagged a quote-tweet the president posted, where he added a statement to a tweet by Rep. Jim Jordan. The president claimed that people were demanding transparency and “…Legal Observers were refused admittance to count rooms!”
There’s no evidence that legal observers were barred from any ballot counting in the states that have yet to be called. As of Saturday morning, former Vice President Joe Biden had 253 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency. Biden was ahead in the vote counts in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona, according to the New York Times.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge Saturday morning in an email that the platform placed warnings on the three tweets and one quote-tweet “in line with our Civic Integrity Policy, and as is standard with this warning, we will significantly restrict engagements on these Tweets.”
Twitter has been strongly enforcing its Civic Integrity Policy since Election Day, with many labels applied to President Trump’s tweets about the election and ballot-counting. More than a dozen of the president’s tweets had been labeled as of Friday morning. The Saturday morning tweets were labeled less than an hour after they appeared.
In a tweet that wasn’t flagged Saturday, the president announced a “lawyer’s press conference” at 11:30AM ET in Philadelphia. That turned into a press conference with the president’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania.
Not long after Twitter labeled his Saturday morning tweets, the Associated Press and major networks projected Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential contest. Trump, who was reportedly playing golf when the news broke, later tweeted (in all-caps) that he had “won the election, got 71 million legal votes” and that “millions of mail-in ballots” were sent to people who had not asked for them.
Twitter put a label on that tweet as well that read “This claim about election fraud is disputed.
