President Donald Trump flew into a rage on Tuesday night after Twitter used its new fact checking feature to correct his false claim that voting by mail leads to election fraud.
“.@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election,” he tweeted. “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.”
Trump accused the social media platform of “completely stifling FREE SPEECH.”
“And I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” he wrote.
Despite his complaints, Trump’s statement about mail-in voting systems was indeed incorrect. There is no evidence that mail-in voting causes voter fraud.
The Trump campaign leveled similar accusations at Twitter over the feature.
“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,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. “Partnering with the 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.”
Twitter declined to comment.
After Trump had tweeted on Tuesday morning that “there is NO WAY (ZERO!)” that mail-in ballots “will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” Twitter attached a notice beneath the tweet saying “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.”
The notice leads to a Twitter page that fact checks Trump’s false claim with articles from credible news outlets, including the Washington Post and Politico.
