Trump Threatens to Shut Down Twitter for Fact-Checking His Tweets: ‘Clean Up Your Act, NOW!!!’
MANDEL NGAN/AFP
President Donald Trump is continuing his ongoing harangue against both Twitter and alleged mail-in voter fraud in a pair of Wednesday morning tweets, suggesting that “we will strongly regulate, or close them down,” social media platforms that “Republicans feel” silence conservative voices. This message was delivered, ironically, on Twitter, where the president enjoys an audience of over 80 million followers.
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. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
….happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020
As the 2020 general election looms, and President Trump finds himself trailing in both national and battleground state polls, the commander in chief has begun to allege that mail-in voting is rife with cheating. “It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots,” he tweeted Wednesday morning, echoing thoughts he has repeatedly put forth.
Yesterday, however, Twitter added what can fairly be described as 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 have occurred in less than 500 votes in the billions of absentee, mail-in votes that took place between 2000 and 2012.
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.”
