Once again, Donald Trump has doubled down. Following the addition of a fact-checking warning label added to his tweet about mail-in ballots, Trump took to the platform yet again to denounce it. In what may be his strongest words to date against a service that has largely given him free rein to this point, the president suggested that social media services would have to be regulated or shut down. Republicans have long held that social media sites harbor an anti-conservative bias.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” he tweeted. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016.”
That last bit appears to be a reference to the role platforms like Twitter and Facebook played in the 2016 election. Trump then went on to reassert earlier claims about mail-in ballots, accusing a push for easy access to voting amid a pandemic of being a “free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft.”
It was precisely those claims that earned him a Twitter fact-checking label in the first place. As of this writing, however, no such label has been added to the new tweet sent a little after 7AM ET this morning. It’s been a busy couple of days for Trump on his favored social media platform, following the long holiday weekend. Last night he accused the service of “stifling free speech,” in spite of Twitter’s long-standing reluctance to either delete tweets or ban Trump over perceived TOS violations.
This morning the president took to Twitter to once again tie a cable news morning host to an old conspiracy theory about his late-wife host and declare “Obamagate” worse than Watergate.