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Twitter now alerts Trump that Biden is president every time he lies about election fraud

Social media site now tells users that ‘Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the US Presidential election’ 

Gino Spocchia
Sunday 20 December 2020 12:46 GMT
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Joe Biden asks Trump to accept his 'clear victory' after electoral college vote result
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Twitter has updated a label placed on misleading claims made by Donald Trump and others, that declares Joe Biden to have won the election.

The message, which Twitter places on potentially misleading content on the site, now says the president-elect won the election, while it previously said the election was “disputed”.

Users on the site are now told that “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the US Presidential election,” when they see a Twitter post that has the misinformation label.  

It started to appear on tweets posted by the US president on Saturday morning, as he continued to make baseless allegations about the presidential election, which he lost to Mr Biden.

The social media site said the label was updated to “reflect the latest information,” in a statement to several media outlets.

“Following certification of the results of the 2020 US Presidential Election, we've updated our label to reflect the latest information," Twitter spokesperson Nick Pacilio told CNN, who reported on the updated label.

The decision to replace the previous misinformation label, which said “Multiple sources called this election differently,” comes after Mr Biden was certified as president elect by the Electoral College on Monday.

Twitter said last month that almost 300,000 tweets were labelled because they made potentially misleading claims about the election, which Mr Trump has stirred on the site.  

Its critics have meanwhile argued that the previous misinformation label did not do enough to counter baseless claims.

Alex Howard, a democratic governance advocate and director of the Digital Democracy Project at the Demand Progress Educational Fund, told CNN: "They're trying to create a both-sides dynamic when false equivalence misleads people".

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