Trump and his campaign quickly responded to Twitter’s unprecedented move of flagging the president’s tweets as misinformation, blasting the social media platform for “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and falsely asserting that his First Amendment rights were being “completely stifled.” But, notably, neither President Donald Trump nor his reelection team bothered with trying to argue in favor or or support the false and baseless claims in Trump’s posts.

On Tuesday afternoon, Twitter, for the first time, applied a warning label to two of Trump’s tweets from earlier in the day, where he made false claims and unsubstantiated predictions about the risk of fraud from mail-in voting, which one study found has occurred in less than 500 votes in the billions of absentee, mail-in votes that took place between 2000 and 2012.

In a rebuttal on the site, Trump posted two tweets blasting the social media platform and implying that the fact-checks of his baseless, false claims were to be dismissed because they come from news organizations that have frequently covered the unflattering aspects of his administration.

.@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….

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

In his second tweet in the series, Trump then tried to claim that Twitter, a private company, not the U.S. government, was “completely stifling FREE SPEECH” even though his original tweets still stand.

….Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!

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

Trump’s campaign also fired back, issuing a short statement from campaign manager Brad Parscale that accused the social media giant of “partnering with the biased fake news media” in trying to “obstruct and interfere with the President Trump getting his message through.” The fact-checking warning, according to the Trump camp, is merely a “smoke screen” so that Twitter can “lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.”

Trump campaign manager on Twitter flagging Trump mail in vote tweets: “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.” pic.twitter.com/g53gJo4mw2

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) May 26, 2020

The campaign also noted that Twitter’s stated policy of factchecking 2020 campaign messaging is one of the “many reasons” it pulled all of its 2020 advertising from the platform.

 

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2ZBvfbf