Facebook said it added tags to the social media posts of both US presidential candidates.
London:
Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc flagged some of President Donald Trump’s posts about the US elections while the votes were still being counted, in a real-time test of his rules on handling misinformation and premature claims of victory.
The two companies have come under fierce scrutiny over how they control the rapid spread of false information and election-related abuse of their platforms. In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s vote, the two vowed to take action on the positions of candidates attempting to declare an early victory.
With votes still counted early Wednesday, Twitter hid a tweet from Trump saying “we’re BIG, but they’re trying to STEAL the election” behind a tag that said it was potentially misleading. The company also restricted users’ ability to share the post.
Facebook added a tag to the same post that said “final results may be different from initial vote counts as vote count will continue for days or weeks.”
Twitter did not tag a separate post, in which Trump said he would make a statement, adding: “A BIG GAIN!” A spokeswoman said this was because the language was vague and unclear about what victory was being claimed.
Facebook added a notice to that post that read: “The votes are still being counted. The winner of the 2020 US presidential election has not been projected.”
A Facebook spokesperson said it would run notifications at the top of the feed saying the same thing on Facebook and on its photo-sharing site Instagram. Automatic tags would also begin to apply to both candidates’ posts with this information.
Twitter began adding fact-checking tags to Trump’s tweets in May. Facebook, which has been criticized by some lawmakers and employees for failing to act on inflammatory or misleading posts by the president, has also introduced more hashtags around the election.
On Wednesday, a group of Facebook critics that recently formed its own rival ‘oversight board’ to review its content moderation appeared to criticize the company for failing to restrict the scope of Trump’s tagged content, tweeting: “You can. . Still. Share. The. Post. #DoYourJob “.
Trump claimed in a speech broadcast live on both platforms that he had won the election, with millions of votes yet to be counted. His Democratic rival Joe Biden previously said he was confident of winning the contest.
Facebook tagged the video, which had 2.6 million views Wednesday morning, with a warning that the vote counting could continue for “days or weeks after the polls closed.” The video had no label or warning on Twitter, where it was posted by the Trump campaign and retweeted by the president.
“The tapes or clips of the press conference by themselves are not a violation of our policies,” said a Twitter spokeswoman.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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