Twitter and Facebook label Trump posts claiming the election is being stolen as votes in key states are still being counted
US President Donald Trump gestures after speaking during election night in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, early on November 4, 2020.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
Twitter and Facebook have appended messages to another post from President Donald Trump Wednesday morning.
The labels come after both platforms flagged Trump’s post early Wednesday claiming opponents are trying to steal the election. NBC News has not yet projected the presidential election results, and votes are still being counted in several key states.
Twitter appended a warning over one post, in which the president wrote, “Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. 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!”
The Twitter warning reads: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Facebook, in its label, wrote, “Final results may be different from the initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks after polls close.”
“As votes are still being counted across the country, our teams continue to take enforcement action on Tweets that prematurely declare victory or contain misleading information about the election broadly,” a Twitter spokesman said via email.
Another post had been labeled by Facebook but not by Twitter as of late morning Wednesday.
Facebook’s label on that post reads, “As expected, election results will take longer this year. Millions of people across the US voted by mail, and mail ballots take longer to count.”
Twitter also labeled a post from Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, saying that Joe Biden had won the state.
Facebook began alerting users early Wednesday that ballots are still being counted, after President Donald Trump falsely claimed that he had won the presidential election. The messages appear at the top of the feeds for both Instagram and Facebook.
“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,” Facebook said in a tweet. “We’re also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information.”
