In a first, Twitter has labelled two tweets by United States (US) President Donald Trump making false statements about mail-in voting as “potentially misleading“.

The two tweets, which were labelled as misleading after Twitter fact-checked Trump’s claims for the first time, had claimed that “mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent” and would result in “a rigged election”.

The tweets were primarily about California’s effort to expand mail-in voting due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. On Sunday, the Republican National Committee sued California Governor Gavin Newsom over the state’s moves to expand mail-in voting.

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Twitter’s spokesperson said that the tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labelled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots”.

The label attached to tweets of President Trump says “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” that link leads to a collection of tweets and news articles debunking the president’s statement.

On the fact check page, Twitter writes “Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to a rigged election”. On the contrary, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud”.

The move by Twitter comes in line with the new policy introduced earlier this month to curb the spread of “misleading content related to the pandemic”, said a Twitter spokesperson.

Brad Parscale, Trump campaign manager, responded to Twitter’s decision in a statement. “Partnering with biased fake news media ‘fact-checkers’ is only a smokescreen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.”

Trump responded on Twitter, saying the company is “now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and that the company is “completely stifling free speech”.

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