Twitter has added a “misleading” label to a tweet by Donald Trump about mail-in voting – but will leave the post online.
In the president’s post, he suggested that the results from the November election may not be accurate because of mail-in voting. There is nothing to indicate that the mail-in voting will lead to any significant degree of voter fraud, or that it could lead to the election result not being determined.
It is a falsehood that Mr Trump has repeatedly tried to push, both on his Twitter account and elsewhere.
The latest post now includes a message that includes a large exclamation mark and tells users to click it to “learn how voting by mail is safe and secure”. Clicking that button takes users to a special page that includes tweets and editorial content about the fact that “voting by mail is legal and safe”.
Unlike other tweets that have been censured by Twitter, the post is available to read as normal. Anyone navigating to Mr Trump’s account or scrolling through his feed will be able to see the tweet.
Previously, Twitter has hidden those tweets behind a special warning that requires users to explicitly press to “view” a post. That same warning indicated that the company had decided it should stay online because doing so is in the “public’s interest”, but that it had nonetheless “violated the Twitter Rules”.
The new label applied to the mail-in voting post does not explicitly call Mr Trump’s post misleading. But Twitter’s “Safety" account did so in a tweet.
“We’ve added a label to this Tweet for making a potentially misleading statement regarding the process of mail-in voting, and to offer more context for anyone who may see the Tweet," the post read. It made reference to the company’s newly updated Civic Integrity Policy, which sets out how Twitter will respond to similar posts.
That Twitter account has in recent weeks largely become a place for Twitter to catalogue the various labels it has added to Mr Trump’s tweets. On 12 September, it announced it was adding a similar label to a post encouraging people to vote twice; it did the same on 3 September; and on 23 August it described sanctions added to a Trump post that made “misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting”.
