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Fact Check
We analyzed the president’s Twitter feed for a week. A third of his posts contained falsehoods or murky accusations, underscoring the challenge to Twitter’s chief, Jack Dorsey, of policing him.
Twitter and its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, placed warnings on three of President Trump’s tweets last week, taking a measured but hotly debated step to place some limit on the president’s use of social media to spread falsehoods and incite his followers.
Twitter attached labels refuting two of Mr. Trump’s tweets on voter fraud and restricted one that implied protesters in Minneapolis could be shot. But it left countless others unchallenged, including those baselessly insinuating that the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough killed a former staff member.
A New York Times review of the president’s 139 Twitter posts from Sunday, May 24, to Saturday, May 30, found at least 26 contained clearly false claims, including five about mail-in voting that were not flagged, five promoting the false conspiracy theory about Mr. Scarborough and three about Twitter itself. Another 24 were misleading, lacked context or traded in innuendo. (This analysis did not include dozens of Mr. Trump’s retweets.)
To put it another way, more than a third of the president’s tweets over the course of a week contained dubious information. That presents a challenge both to Twitter and to the millions of people who are exposed to Mr. Trump on social media, especially now, with the nation facing the triple challenge of a pandemic, economic dislocation and nationwide protests over systemic racism.
Twitter attached information to refute two of Mr. Trump’s posts about mail-in voting that falsely claimed that California was sending ballots to “anyone living in the state no matter who they are or how they got there.” State officials will mail ballots to registered voters only.
Mr. Dorsey said that those tweets on May 26 specifically violated the company’s civic integrity policy as they “may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot.”
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Fact Checking Trump's False Claims on Twitter – The New York Times
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