Donald Trump went ballistic on Tuesday after Twitter slapped fact-checks on a pair of his tweets related to mail-in voting.
“Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election,” the president whined. “They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect.”
“Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” Trump added, hinting that he’ll take action against the social media giant.
.@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post….
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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
….Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, also chimed in after his boss’s tweets were flagged.
“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” said Parscale, according to The Hill.
He added, “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.”
Leave it to the Trump campaign to be personally offended by facts.
If anything, social media has been too easy on Donald Trump
It’s no surprise that the president’s campaign team is up in arms over Twitter’s absolutely appropriate decision to flag some of his flagrant lies. After all, it doesn’t take much to send Trump into a childish frenzy.
But if anything, the move by Twitter is long overdue. Trump spends countless hours throughout each day spewing nonsense – nearly all of it either misleading or downright false – and it almost always goes unchecked.
As PoliticusUSA’s Jason Easley noted on Tuesday, Twitter still hasn’t done anything about Trump’s non-stop touting of a murder conspiracy theory related to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough – even as the family of the deceased woman has urged them to take action.
Twitter took a step in the right direction on Tuesday when they flagged Donald Trump’s dangerous lies about mail-in voting, but much more needs to be done to combat the president’s endless stream of lies and hate.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.