Defying President Trump, Twitter Doubles Down on Labeling Tweets

Twitter continued to add new fact-checking labels to hundreds of tweets, even as the Trump administration issued an executive order to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms. Twitter’s move escalated the confrontation between the company and President Donald Trump, who has fulminated over actions taken by his favorite social media service. Twitter had appended fact-checking labels for the first time to two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots, rebutting their accuracy. In response, President Trump accused Twitter of stifling speech and declared that he would put a stop to the interference. But Twitter has doubled down, adding fact-checking labels to messages from Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry who had claimed that the coronavirus outbreak may have begun in the United States and been brought to China by the US military. Twitter also added notices on hundreds of tweets that falsely claimed a photo of a man in a red baseball cap was Derek Chauvin, an officer involved in the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who died this week after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police. The Twitter label alerted viewers that the image was “manipulated media.”