Twitter fact-checks Donald Trump on mail-in voting fraud

Twitter has started to mark some of President Trump’s tweets as false and misleading.

As of early Tuesday evening, two of his tweets about fraud problems with mail-in voting have been accompanied with an exclamation-mark icon and a link marked “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”

Clicking the link would lead to a separate page with a paragraph under the headline “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

The paragraph cites the Washington Post, CNN and “experts” as calling such claims “unsubstantiated.”

In his tweets, Mr. Trump railed against Democrats’ coronavirus-related plans to expand voting by mail.

“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!” he wrote over two tweets.

Mr. Trump is almost certainly the first federal elected official to whose posts Twitter has decided to attach negative fact checks. Twitter has come under pressure from liberal commentators and officials who want to kick Mr. Trump off Twitter entirely for what they call his abusive behavior and serial lying.

Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign manager, called the move the latest not-unexpected effort by Silicon Valley “to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters.”

He called the citing of “biased fake news media ’fact checkers’ [as] only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.

“There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them,” he concluded.

Mr. Trump himself took to Twitter later in the evening to accuse the social-media giant of “completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”

“@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,” he claimed.