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Twitter slapped yet another Trump tweet about mail-in voting with a 'misleading' label and stopped other users from retweeting it

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President Donald Trump. Getty
  • President Donald Trump attacked mail-in voting once again, tweeting on Monday: "Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA."

  • Twitter placed a label and a fact-check link on the tweet, warning that it might be "misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process."

  • It also stopped other users from liking, retweeting, or replying to the tweet, a company representative confirmed to Business Insider. The aim was to "significantly reduce the tweet's visibility," the person said.

  • Twitter has previously placed fact-checks and misinformation warnings on tweets from Trump that claimed mail-in voting would be fraudulent and that ballot drop-off boxes were "not COVID sanitized."

  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump has been fact-checked by Twitter. Again.

Trump tweeted about mail-in voting on Monday, claiming there were "big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA." He continued: "Must have final total on November 3rd."

Twitter, in response, placed a label above the tweet saying it "might be misleading," wrote a fact-check below it about mail-in voting, and stopped other users from liking, retweeting, or replying to the tweet.

Over the course of his reelection campaign, Trump has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it is insecure or fraudulent, when historically mail-in voter fraud is exceedingly rare.

Trump mail-in voting tweet
Trump's tweet got slapped with a misinformation label. Twitter/Business Insider

Since June, Trump's campaign has filed lawsuits in seven states trying to block the expansion of voting by mail.

Clicking the "learn more" link on Twitter's warning takes users to Twitter's "Civic Integrity" policy page. "With this warning and in line with our Civic Integrity Policy, we will significantly reduce the tweet's visibility and people will not be able to like, reply or retweet it," a representative told Business Insider. The person clarified that users would be able to quote retweet, so they would be able to retweet so long as they added their own comment.

Twitter also placed a fact-check below the tweet, taking users to a page titled "Voting by mail is legal and safe, experts and data confirm."

Latest in a series of Twitter warnings about Trump's tweets

This is not the first time Twitter has slapped a warning on one of Trump's tweets about mail-in voting. In August, the social-media company placed a "public interest notice" on a tweet that claimed, without evidence, that ballot drop-off boxes were both a "voter security disaster" and "not COVID sanitized."

A Twitter representative told Business Insider at the time that the platform had taken action because the tweet contained "misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting." The platform placed the same constraints stopping users from retweeting, liking, or replying to the tweet.

In May, the platform also placed a fact-check label on a series of tweets from Trump in which he claimed mail-in ballots would be "substantially fraudulent."

The decision appeared to enrage Trump, and two days later he signed an executive order aimed at constraining social-media companies that he accused of discriminating against conservatives.

The order was broadly written to allow federal regulators to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the part of US law that gives internet companies the right to moderate the content on their platforms and offers them legal protection from liability for user-generated content.

Though legal experts critiqued the order as potentially unconstitutional, in September the Department of Justice submitted proposed retooling of the legislation to Congress, and the Federal Communications Commission's chairman, Ajit Pai, announced on October 16 that the FCC would "clarify the meaning" of the law.

Section 230 will be coming under even more intense scrutiny on Wednesday, as the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Google are set to give evidence to Congress about the law.

Read the original article on Business Insider