Politico | How Covid-19 pushed Twitter to fact-check Trump’s tweets

The company is taking the lessons learned from countering tweets that could endanger people’s health and applying them to Trump’s Twitter feed

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US President Donald Trump threatened Wednesday to shutter social media platforms after Twitter for the first time acted against his false tweets. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:03pm, 28 May 2020Updated: 1:03pm, 28 May 2020

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Nancy Scola on politico.com on May 27, 2020.

It was the pandemic, Twitter says, that freed the company to attach fact-check warnings to a pair of US President Donald Trump’s tweets this week.

Critics have complained for years that Twitter lets Trump run wild on the platform. But the company had generally taken a hands-off approach to the president, partly because of a company policy that considers it in the public’s interest to know what world leaders are thinking, and partly because Twitter judged many of Trump’s tweets to fall into a grey area not covered by its rules banning specific behaviours like abuse or posting hateful content.

Twitter says the coronavirus outbreak prompted it to re-evaluate its approach to these grey-area tweets and treat some of them as potentially dangerous.

“Covid was a game changer,” said Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough.

“We now have the tools in place to label content that may contain misleading claims that could cause offline harm,” said Rosborough. Those tools include the warning labels attached to Trump’s tweets that link to a Twitter “Moment”, or collection of content, explaining objections to his post.

Twitter has not yet defined what generally counts as offline harm, but in the case of coronavirus-related content, it has identified tweets like those that advocate protecting yourself from the virus using methods public health authorities say are ineffective.