Twitter cracks down on right-wing election misinformation in Pennsylvania

Twitter applied labels to and restricted the spread of posts from some right-wing accounts in Pennsylvania making unfounded claims of election fraud on Tuesday.

Mike Roman, the Trump campaign’s national Election Day operations director, claimed in several tweets that in Philadelphia, Republican poll watchers were being turned away from voting locations, that Democrats were handing out literature to Americans in line and that ballot boxes were being stuffed.

Four of his posts were marked with labels and one was restricted from being retweeted or liked under Twitter’s civic integrity policy, a spokesperson for the platform confirmed to The Hill.

The Philadelphia Republican Party’s account had multiple posts alleging without evidence that voters were being allowed to vote twice and that parents and children were voting for each other in Allegheny County appended with information labels.

One particular post that claimed poll workers were instructing voters to select Democrats and that broken machines were causing three-hour waits was restricted from being shared and had an interstitial label placed on it noting that “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”

Stephen Moore, an economist and adviser to President Trump, claimed in a tweet that election officials were barring individuals from observing absentee ballot counting. That post was slapped with a label with information about the safety of mail-in voting.

Allegheny County directly disputed that post.

“No one is being blocked from anything and no one has reported anything or raised any concerns at the site,” the account wrote.

Pennsylvania is considered by many to be a key bellwether state for the presidential election. Trump on Monday night criticized a Supreme Court ruling on a challenge to the state’s vote-counting rules, arguing falsely that it would “induce” violence and attracting a warning label from Twitter in the process. 

Philadelphia, which leans heavily Democratic, has been a particular target of election misinformation from Republicans.

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday called out some of Roman’s tweets as being “deliberately deceptive.”