The Twitter official responsible for the platform’s fact-checking policy has tweeted that members of the Trump administration are “Nazis,” among other false and inflammatory statements on the platform.
Yoel Roth, whose official job title is “Head of Site Integrity,” explained the platform’s new policy in a May 11 blog post on “misleading information” on coronavirus.
“In serving the public conversation, our goal is to make it easy to find credible information on Twitter and to limit the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content,” he said.
Twitter appears to have applied that policy to a broader category of assertions, moving beyond COVID-19 to President Donald Trump’s claim on Tuesday that vote-by-mail would lead to more voter fraud — a prediction with which even some Democrats have agreed.
Subsequently, Twitter slapped a “get the facts” label on Trump’s tweets about voter fraud — and provided links to CNN and the Washington Post, two avowedly anti-Trump outlets that enthusiastically pushed the Russia collusion hoax.
Critics on Twitter, ironically, pointed out that Roth’s own tweets include exactly the kind of misleading and abusive content that Twitter’s policy purports to limit.
Roth has also defended his use of the homophobic slur “fag” on the Twitter platform:
As Breitbart News’ Allum Bokhari reported, Tuesday’s intervention is believed to be the first time that the company has used a fact-checking label on one of Trump’s tweets. It is not clear why Twitter chose a tweet about voting by mail.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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