Twitter flagged posts by prominent Democrats including Andrew Yang and Stacey Abrams for prematurely declaring the outcome of pivotal U.S. Senate runoff elections decided by Georgia voters Tuesday.
Mr. Yang, a former presidential hopeful now running for New York City mayor, and Ms. Abrams, an activist and former Georgia state lawmaker, claimed victory for Democrats before the results were clear.
Twitter left their posts in place but applied warning labels reading: “Multiple sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted.”
Matt Drudge, the founder of the popular Drudge Report website, had the label applied to one of his posts on the platform. So did Dave Wasserman, an election forecaster for The Cook Political Report.
Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Georgia Republicans, ran in separate runoff elections held Tuesday against Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively.
Mr. Warnock was projected to have won the race against Ms. Loeffler as of early Wednesday, while Mr. Ossoff maintained a razor-thin lead over the Republican incumbent in that contest.
Twitter applied the label to a pair of tweets made by Mr. Yang late Tuesday evening prematurely claiming Democrats won both Senate races.
“We f–ing did it,” he said in one of the flagged tweets.
Ms. Abrams and Mr. Wasserman had the same label added to their own posts by Twitter for having separately called Mr. Warnock the winner of his Senate race before the official results were known. Mr. Wasserman later called the other race for Mr. Ossoff in a tweet that soon received the same label.
Twitter began applying labels to election-related posts made on its platform shortly before November’s general election, which resulted in President-elect Joseph. R. Biden defeating Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump has made numerous bogus claims about the election in the months since on Twitter, which labeled or otherwise acted on at least 40 of his related tweets in the week after voting ended.
Republicans are not the only ones repeatedly being flagged by Twitter, however. Mr. Yang had one of his tweets labeled by Twitter in November for prematurely calling Mr. Biden the next president.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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