Twitter briefly restricts Donald Trump's tweets about 'election fraud'

Twitter briefly tightened restrictions on US President Donald Trump's official Twitter account on Saturday, as some users reported the inability to like, retweet, or reply to his tweets. This phenomenon was observed for tweets marked as "disputed." For such tweets, users could neither copy the URL, nor search the text of the tweet to yield results.

A Twitter spokesperson wrote to The Verge on Saturday, informing the platform "inadvertently took action to limit engagements" on Trump's tweet, but had since reversed the action.

The spokesperson added that any tweet violating Twitter's 'Civic Integrity Policy' "will continue to be labeled in order to give more context for anyone who might see the Tweet."

Regarding developments in the attempt to delegitimise the election results, a request from the Attorney General of Texas to overturn election results in four key states was rejected by the US Supreme Court on Friday. This was the latest attempt by the president and his team to persuade the courts to overturn the result, after consistently having done so for weeks, albeit unsuccessfully.

Twitter had started applying warning labels to tweets containing election misinformation ahead of the US presidential election on November 3 to restrict engagement with those tweets. The microblogging platform had announced that tweets with premature claims of victory would be labeled, and tweets trying to interfere in the election results could also be removed.  

Democrats had criticised social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for not doing their bit to curb the spread of misinformation and propaganda regarding the elections on their respective platforms. In light of this criticism and the veracity of the election results, YouTube announced earlier that it would take down videos that claim election fraud starting December 9, 2020.

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