Social media platforms moved quickly to counteract President Trump’s assertions that he won the 2020 election and his accusations of irregularities with a series of notifications, tags, and labels on their platforms.
After Mr. Trump said on early Wednesday morning that he thought he had won the 2020 election, Facebook soon began posting “Votes Are Still Being Counted” notifications on Facebook and Instagram.
“Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected,” said Facebook in a tweet from its @fbnewsroom account. “We’re also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information.”
Twitter has taken more aggressive action and restricted the visibility of several of Mr. Trump’s tweets and retweets about the election.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” Mr. Trump tweeted shortly before 1 a.m. on Wednesday. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
Twitter restricted the visibility of that tweet and applied a label that said “some or all” of the content in the tweet was disputed and could be misleading.
“We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election,” Twitter said via its @TwitterSafety account. “This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy.”
On Wednesday, Twitter applied the same warning label to tweets from Mr. Trump on election results and on voting in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled,” said Mr. Trump in one tweet restricted by Twitter. “Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!”
“They are working hard to make up 500,000 vote advantage in Pennsylvania disappear — ASAP. Likewise, Michigan and others!” Mr. Trump said in another tweet restricted by Twitter on Wednesday afternoon.
Voters that click to view Mr. Trump’s tweet and bypass Twitter’s warning label also see a tag imploring Twitter users to click to, “Learn more about US 2020 election security efforts” that redirects users to its civic integrity policy.
Federal lawmakers are expected to question the social media platforms’ executives about their handling of 2020 election content later this month. Both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 17.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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