Trump’s Posts Suggesting Americans Vote Twice Flagged by Facebook, Twitter

Todd Spangler
·3 min read

Facebook and Twitter both placed warning labels on Donald Trump’s messages shared on the platforms encouraging U.S. voters to cast mail-in ballots and then show up in person at local polls to “see whether or not your your Mail In Vote has been Tabulated (Counted).”

On Thursday, in identical messages posted to Facebook and Twitter, Trump told followers to mail in ballots, and then on Election Day to head to the polls to see if they could cast their votes again in case their mailed ballots had not recorded. Voting more than once is illegal in the U.S.

Yesterday, Trump — who has repeatedly assailed the integrity of mail-in voting, in spite of evidence showing extremely low levels of fraud — suggested in an interview that voters in North Carolina vote twice, both by mail and in person.

Twitter hid two of Trump’s tweets on the topic. In a notice overlaid on the posts, it said the president’s tweets violated the service’s rules about civic and election integrity but that it left them accessible “in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

“We placed a public interest notice on two Tweets in this thread for violating our Civic Integrity Policy, specifically for encouraging people to potentially vote twice,” the Twitter Safety team tweeted.

Facebook, meanwhile, appended a fact-checking notice below the Trump message that says, “Voting by mail has a long history of trustworthiness in the US and the same is predicted this year. (Source: Bipartisan Policy Center).” In the warning label, Facebook included a link to its Voting Information Center hub.

Earlier in the day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who just a few months ago said he didn’t want the social giant to “do fact-checks for politicians” before shifting his stance — outlined a series of new steps designed to encourage voting and discourage misinformation. Those include a ban on new political ads leading up to the Nov. 3 elections, as well as a policy specifically to fact-check any claims that “lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud.”

Here’s the text of what Trump wrote:

“Based on the massive number of Unsolicited & Solicited Ballots that will be sent to potential Voters for the upcoming 2020 Election, & in order for you to MAKE SURE YOUR VOTE COUNTS & IS COUNTED, SIGN & MAIL IN your Ballot as EARLY as possible. On Election Day, or Early Voting, go to your Polling Place to see whether or not your Mail In Vote has been Tabulated (Counted). If it has you will not be able to Vote & the Mail In System worked properly. If it has not been Counted, VOTE (which is a citizen’s right to do). If your Mail In Ballot arrives after you Vote, which it should not, that Ballot will not be used or counted in that your vote has already been cast & tabulated. YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED, it hasn’t been ‘lost, thrown out, or in any way destroyed’. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”

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