Twitter Flags Trump Tweet About Mail Drop Boxes for “Misleading Health Claims”

President Donald Trump walks up to speak during a news conference at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House August 10, 2020 in Washington, D.C. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Even for President Donald Trump’s standards, one of the tweets he fired off Sunday morning was filled with an unusual number of lies and misrepresentations. The president warned that mail drop boxes are a “voter security disaster” because they allow someone to “vote multiple times.” He also wondered who controls them and whether they are “placed in Republican or Democrat areas.” And to top off the weird bunch of strung together conspiracy theories, the president went on to suggest that anyone who uses them is at risk of contracting the coronavirus: “They are not Covid sanitized.”

Almost six hours after he wrote that eyebrow-raising tweet, Twitter flagged it for violating its policies. The tweet, Twitter said, violated its “Civic Integrity Policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.” Despite the violation, the tweet won’t be deleted outright “given its relevance to ongoing public conversation.” But the way users of the social network will be able to engage with the tweet will be limited. While people can still retweet the message with a comment, they can’t like it, reply to it or retweet it.

This is not the first time one of the president’s tweets having to do with the election gets flagged by Twitter. In late May, Twitter labeled two tweets from Trump as potentially misleading and added fact-check labels to the messages that warned about risks to mail-in voting. Twitter added links to the fact checks of the two tweets that assured voting by mail would be plagued by fraud. Trump did not like that one bit and accused Twitter of being biased against conservatives. “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,” Trump tweeted. The president later signed an executive order calling on regulators to review a 1996 law that protects websites from liability for what users post, a measure that was seen as retaliation to Twitter’s fact-check label.

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