twitter has marked more than a quarter of President Donald Trump’s contributions since his defeat in the November 3 presidential election.
While social media platforms have sporadically placed warnings on his posts since March, analysis of Trump’s feed shows that its use has increased massively as the 2020 election approaches – and continued in the weeks after.
Between November 3 and December 3, the president, who lost the election to Democratic opponent Joe Biden, posted a total of 862 postings – including tweets and retweets – between November 3 and December 3, 230 of these postings were accompanied by a warning notice or flag.
Of the total of 254 postings on Trump’s feed that have ever been flagged by Twitter, only 24 were posted before November between March and October. Prior to the last two months, they were most commonly used in September, when 11 posts were sanctioned.
The analysis was conducted using the Trump Twitter archive and Factbs.se, the latter maintaining a list of policy-violating content shared by the President.
And while the analysis indicates that Trump has so far flagged about 27 percent of the posts since November 3, Biden must still have moderated his updates.
The president’s account, which still has 88.7 million supporters despite signs of a declining following, became a hotbed of misinformation after the election results in Biden’s favor – an election that Trump still hasn’t abandoned.
The first series of flags for voting came soon after the election was over and initially hid completely behind a warning sign indicating that the content was controversial or misleading. Later, the platform updated its approach and added single-line disclaimers under the items.
As a result, it is now an extremely common sight to scroll down the President’s feed to see “This allegation of election fraud is controversial”, “Several sources call this election different” or “Find out about the efforts to ensure election security in the United States in 2020”.
Yesterday Twitter added a disclaimer to a video posted by Trump claiming that the U.S. electoral system is under “coordinated attack and siege. It is unclear how effective this tactic is, as the clip has been viewed more than three million times.
However, in a blog on November 12, Twitter tried to reassure users that it was a viable approach, revealing that between October 27 and November 11, some 300,000 tweets had been flagged as “controversial or potentially misleading”.
It said that 456 of these tweets were covered up and that about 74 percent of users who saw the posts saw them after a label or warning message was attached.
The blog post read: “We continue to use labels to add context and limit the risk of spreading harmful election misinformation without important context”.
However, Trump had continued to use the website to spread unfounded accusations of election fraud, including that voting machines had been tampered with. He also seemed fixated on the number of votes his opponent could win after it was reported that Biden had exceeded the historic figure of 80 million, in part due to a record turnout.
“This election is a far greater scandal (FRAUD!) than anyone thought – not even close,” Trump wrote on Wednesday. The post was quickly marked by Twitter.
