With the latest results from Tuesday’s election handing some big wins to Joe Biden, the Trump campaign decided to take action.
On Wednesday afternoon, Eric Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany published posts on social media declaring President Trump the victor in Pennsylvania, a state where votes are still being tallied and no winner has officially been announced.
Twitter took action promptly on President Trump’s early morning tweet spreading misinformation about voter fraud and stolen elections. It added a warning label calling the tweet “misleading” and restricted replies and retweets on the posting.
However, Twitter wasn’t so fast to slap warning labels on the president’s son’s post — or his press secretary’s. Both were up for nearly 30 minutes before a warning label declared that “official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted.”
While Twitter took a while to slap the labels on these tweets from the Trump camp, the company at least had a policy in place to deal with them once they were brought to its attention.
Facebook, on the other hand, had to change its policies on the fly on Wednesday due to the Trump campaign’s misinformation, which was also posted on Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking platform.
The election misinformation policy laid out by Facebook originally only prohibited premature victory declarations in the overall presidential race. This allowed for a loophole where, for example, the Trump campaign could declare victory in a particular state and not be hit with a warning label.
But then the official Trump campaign Facebook page declared it had won Pennsylvania. McEnany also posted her victory tweet on her Facebook page. The social network announced an update to its policy on Wednesday afternoon to cover election misinformation at the statewide level too.
It’s critical that people have accurate information about elections results. To that end we’re expanding our premature declaration of victory labels to apply to people beyond the presidential candidates. We’ll apply these at state-level and overall. https://t.co/XKRqfFv7Ja
— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) November 4, 2020
As of the publication of this article, the race in Pennsylvania has still not been called.