Trump has yet again been peddling brazen misinformation about the election. On Saturday, he took to Twitter and called on North Carolina voters to vote twice; first, he said, they should vote by mail, and then they should visit their polling place and attempt to vote in person in order to supposedly make sure that their earlier ballot was counted. Trying to vote twice is a crime, and Trump is proposing committing that crime as a solution to a problem — systemic issues with mail-in voting — that does not exist. Shortly after Trump posted his tweet calling on North Carolina residents to try and vote twice, Twitter placed a notice on the post indicating that it had violated its election integrity-related rules.
Besides the message that Twitter attached to the tweet, they also restricted the post’s reach. Users can no longer comment directly on it, it seems, and “like” and “retweet” tallies are no longer displayed. The message itself reads as follows:
‘This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.’
Check it out below:
This occasion is not the first time that Twitter has placed a notice like the above example on one of Trump’s tweets. He has peddled misinformation related to the election on the platform in the past. He’s also been running far and wide with election lies outside the platform as well — he has ranted and raved against mail-in voting, which he claims is full of opportunities for fraud. However, that’s not true. Mail-in voting has already been used at a high rate across the country for awhile; five states have conducted elections almost entirely via the mail.
Trump has tried to make his complaints make more sense via specifying “universal mail-in voting” as the target of his concern, but there has never been any serious possibility of having universal mail-in voting across the entire country. Even if there was, the entire volume of mail wouldn’t even surpass an ordinary single day’s processing capacity at the Postal Service, although the ballots would of course have to be added onto whatever else happened to be mailed that day.
