Donald Trump attacks Twitter 'head of integrity' as a 'hater' for his anti-Trump tweets - as White House demands to know who fact-checked president's posts
Donald Trump attacked a senior Twitter executive as a 'hater' Thursday for his anti-Trump posts, amid an escalating row with the platform over it fact-checking two of the president's tweets.
The president targeted Yoel Roth in a tweet complaining about being fact-checked as the White House press secretary demanded to know who at Twitter carried out the fact checks.
Roth is the site's head of 'integrity' and was said by Twitter not to be involved in the factcheck which labeled Trump's claim that all mail-in ballots in the presidential election had 'zero chance' of not being 'substantially fraudulent.'
But his history of anti-Trump messages was seized on by Trump and the White House as evidence of bias, as Trump prepared to sign an executive order which could open the way for an avalanche of legal action against social media giants.
Yoel had been defended by Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey, who tweeted that complaints should be addressed to him, not members of his team, but Trump lashed out at the executive early Thursday afternoon.
'So ridiculous to see Twitter trying to make the case that mail-in ballots are not subject to FRAUD,' he tweeted.
'We will ask who the fact-checkers are,' White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told 'Fox News' after Twitter flagged a pair of tweets by President Trump
Roth tweeted in November 2016 that fly over states were racist
Roth referred to the Trump administration as 'actual Nazis in the White House' in a January 2017 tweet
He also compared Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi Joseph Goebbels in a 2017 tweet
'How stupid, there are examples, & cases, all over the place. Our election process will become badly tainted & a laughingstock (sick) all over the world. Tell that to your hater @yoyoel.'
The attack came as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany demanded to know the identify of the 'fact-checkers' who for the first time this week appended corrective information to President's Trump's tweet about mail-in ballots.
The escalation of hostilities came on a day when Trump was preparing to to sign an executive order targeting social media.
Trump has made the claim as states seek to boost mail-in voting amid social distancing orders caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
'So Twitter wants this to be the standard. They get to, quote, fact-check that president of the United States, in an untruthful way, not fact check Chinese propaganda until we pointed out and they started doing it moments ago, but yet we don't get to ask who the fact-checkers are?' she said.
'That's an untenable proposition and it's an unfair proposition and we will ask who the fact-checkers are,' she told Fox & Friends in an interview. She was referencing the site's decision to correct a tweet by China's foreign minister claiming without evidence that the U.S. military brought the coronavirus to Wuhan.
'And let me just note that there are two models here. You have FaceBook and you have Twitter and you -- you have [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg, who said it's not my job to be the arbiter of truth. You have that model and then you have the [Twitter boss Jack] Dorsey model, which is completely incoherent in the way it's deployed and not fact-checking Chinese propaganda until minutes ago but fact-checking the president in a way that is untruthful,' she said.
She also referenced reports that Roth, had himself sent out a series of politically charged tweets – including calling Sen. Mitch McConnell a 'personality-free bag of farts.'
Twitter says Roth is not himself involved in fact-checking but in protecting the site from bots.
She wouldn't reveal details on the executive order Trump is rushing to prepare.
'What I do want to point to is the reason for this executive order. We have seen some egregious actions by Twitter.
'For them to single out the president's tweet, which was a very truthful tweet, you've got to ask yourself, what kind of political motivation was there in them doing that when they were not signaling, until minutes ago -- minutes ago, before I walked out here, they were not fact-checking Chinese propaganda that was blaming Covid on the United States military.
'There was no fact-check of Chinese propaganda, but they managed to fact-check, in a wrong way, the president of the United States,' she said.
President Trump is planning an order that could open up social media firms to an avalanche of lawsuits
Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey told critics to hold him accountable but not blame his staff
Trump has repeatedly attacked mail-in ballots as subject to fraud. Twitter flagged the comment as unsubstantiated and provided a link to 'get the facts' about mail-in ballots. Trump himself voted by mail as president
Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath two of Trump's tweets about potential for fraud with mail-in voting, prompting users to 'get the facts about mail-in ballots'
'And you've got to ask, when they're hiring people like this man right here as the head of the site integrity, Yoel Roth, who's tweeted that members of this administration are Nazis, he's the one making the determinations on fact-checks? He's part of that team? That's pretty egregious. And Twitter needs to answer for this and for their behavior,' she said.
Trump weighed in with another tweet on the subject Thursday.
'So ridiculous to see Twitter trying to make the case that Mail-In Ballots are not subject to FRAUD. How stupid, there are examples, & cases, all over the place. Our election process will become badly tainted & a laughingstock all over the World. Tell that to your hater @yoyoel,' he wrote, like McEnany flagging Roth.
Trump earlier this week tweeted there was 'no way' mail-in ballots would be 'anything less than fraudulent' – although both Trump and McEnany have voted absentee. In McEnany's case, she has done so 11 times over the last decade.
Asked how she could be assured that her own vote was counted accurately, she responded: 'The president's been very clear, every American is entitled to vote the way that I did. If you are someone who's working out of state, that your domicile is in a different state, you are absolutely entitled to request an absentee ballot and to cast your ballot by mail. I'm entitled to that. The average viewer watching is entitled to that. The president has no qualms with that, she said.
Trump has long accused Twitter of being biased and on Wednesday threatened to close down social media platforms as a result of the warning put on his tweets.
'Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,' he tweeted on Wednesday.
It followed on from previous tweets late Tuesday in which he also lashed out at the company, accusing Twitter of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
'Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!' he said.
Trump, who has more than 80 million Twitter followers, had claimed in tweets earlier in the day that mail-in ballots would be 'substantially fraudulent' and result in a 'rigged election.'
He also singled out the governor of California over the issue, although the state is not the only one to use mail-in ballots.
Hours later, Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath two of those tweets, prompting readers to 'get the facts about mail-in ballots' and directing them to a page with information aggregated by Twitter staffers about the claims.
A headline at the top of the page stated 'Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud' and was followed by a 'what you need to know' section addressing three specific claims made in the tweets.
The claims were found to unsubstantiated by fact-checkers at CNN, the Washington Post and other media outlets, according to Twitter.
The information aggregated by Twitter included experts pointing out that mail-in voting is rarely linked to fraud and that mail-in ballots are used in states other than California. It also provided links to media outlets debunking Trump's claims.
It is not yet clear who is in charge of aggregating the information included on the Twitter page.
In a statement, Twitter said that Trump's tweets about mail-in voting did not violate the company's rules because they didn't discourage people from voting.
But Trump's vote-by-mail tweets contained 'potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots'.
Twitter said the application of a fact-checking label to Trump's tweets was an extension of its new 'misleading information' policy, introduced earlier this month to combat misinformation about the coronavirus.
It said at the time that it would later extend the COVID-19 policy to other types of disputed or misleading information.
Twitter prompted readers to check the facts in Trump's tweets after the president on Tuesday suggested that California's mail-in balloting initiative would lead to substantial voter fraud in the November general election. The claims were found to unsubstantiated by fact-checkers at CNN, the Washington Post and other media outlets, according to Twitter
Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath two of those tweets, prompting readers to 'get the facts about mail-in ballots' and directing them to a page with information aggregated by Twitter staffers about the claims
Twitter so far has used its policies sparingly against major political figures but did delete tweets by the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela which violated its coronavirus rules.
Trump has never previously faced Twitter sanctions on his account.
Trump posted the same text about mail-in ballots on his official Facebook page, where the post picked up 170,000 reactions and was shared 17,000 times.
Facebook's policy is to remove content that misrepresents methods of voting or voter registration, but in this case it left the post untouched.
Its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said it was not 'an arbiter of truth.'
A Twitter spokesman said Trump's mail-in ballot tweets were related to election integrity and therefore subject to different treatment under its policies.
The company's alert on Trump's mail-in ballot tweets came hours after it refused to delete the president's tweets implying that 'Morning Joe' host Joe Scarborough murdered a Congressional aide who worked for him in 2001.
The widower of the woman who died, Lori Klausutis, sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week begging for Trump's tweets about this conspiracy theory to be deleted.
'My request is simple: Please delete these tweets,' Timothy J. Klausutis wrote last week.
While Twitter wouldn't budge on deleting Trump's tweets, the site had promised to be more proactive about labeling factually inaccurate content.
Asked about the Scarborough tweets, a Twitter spokeswoman said the company was expanding its products and policies to address such tweets more effectively in the future, without elaborating.
The body of Lori Kaye Klausutis, 28, was found in Scarborough's Florida congressional office on July 20, 2001.
Trump has repeatedly tried to implicate Scarborough, now a fierce Trump critic, in the death even though Scarborough was in Washington, not Florida, at the time.
Medical officials ruled that the aide, who had a heart condition and told friends hours earlier that she wasn't feeling well, had fainted and hit her head and foul play was not suspected.
Klausutis wrote in his letter to Twitter that he has struggled to move on with his life due to the ongoing 'bile and misinformation' spread about his wife on the platform, most recently by Trump.
His wife continues to be the subject of conspiracy theories 20 years after her death.
Klausutis called his wife's death 'the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with' and said he feels a marital obligation to protect her memory amid 'a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died.'
He said Trump's tweets violate Twitter's community rules and terms of service, adding: 'An ordinary user like me would be banished.'
Donald Trump attacks Twitter 'head of integrity' as a 'hater' for his anti-Trump tweets - as White House demands to know who fact-checked president's posts
![Donald Trump attacks Twitter 'head of integrity' as a 'hater' for his anti-Trump tweets - as White House demands to know who fact-checked president's posts]()
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May 29, 2020
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