US Election: Twitter and Facebook clamp down on early victory claim

Twitter has hidden and labelled a claim by Donald Trump in which he claimed his opponents “are trying to steal the election”.

It also limited users’ ability to like and reply to the post. It has not acted on any of Mr Biden’s tweets. Facebook, meanwhile, added a fact check to an identical message posted to its platform, but did not go further.

Facebook has also been automatically adding labels to all recent posts on Trump and Joe Biden’s accounts. They inform readers that votes are still being counted and that the winner of the US presidential election has not been projected.

Mr Trump’s first tweet on Wednesday made a further insinuation of fraud, claiming that his votes had “started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted”. That tweet was not immediately marked.

Mr Biden’s first tweet of the day said “we won’t rest until everyone’s vote is counted”.

Facebook has begun placing notifications at the top of the timelines for all US users, explaining that the election had not yet been decided.

“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,” it said.

Twitter said it had labelled Mr Trump’s tweet about the election being “stolen” because it violated the firm’s civic integrity policy.

But the network appears to be allowing some claims of victory, despite warning that it would not. An earlier tweet from Mr Trump that he had enjoyed “a big win!” has been left untouched, as has a carefully-worded tweet from Mr Biden that said “we believe we are on track to win this election”.

No tweets from Mr Biden from election night have been labelled.

Source: bbc.com

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