patrick.net

In 2018, two of the president’s tweets stood out to Twitter officials. In one, Mr. Trump discussed launching nuclear weapons at North Korea, which some employees believed violated company policy against violent threats. In the other, he called a former aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, “a crazed, crying lowlife” and “that dog.”

At the time, Twitter had rules against harassing messages like the tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, but left the tweet up.

The company began working on a specific solution to allow it to respond to violent and inaccurate posts from Mr. Trump and other world leaders without removing the messages. Mr. Dorsey had expressed interest in finding a middle ground, executives said. It also rolled out labels to denote that a tweet needed fact-checking or had videos and photos that had been altered to be misleading.

The effort was overseen by Vijaya Gadde, who leads Twitter’s legal, policy, trust and safety teams. The labels for world leaders, unveiled last June, explained how a politician’s message had broken a Twitter policy and took away tools that could amplify it, like retweets and likes.

“We want to elevate healthy conversations on Twitter and that may sometimes mean offering context,” Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, said in an interview this year.

By the time the labels were introduced, Mr. Trump was not the only head of state testing Twitter’s boundaries. Shortly before Twitter released them, the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, tweeted a sexually explicit video and the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei posted threatening remarks about Israel.

Last month, Twitter used the labels on a tweet from the Brazilian politician Osmar Terra in which he falsely claimed that quarantine increased cases of the coronavirus.

“This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules,” the label read. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

On Tuesday, Twitter officials began discussing labeling Mr. Trump’s messages after he falsely asserted that mail-in ballots were illegally printed and implied they would lead to fraud in the November election. His tweets were flagged to Twitter through a portal it had opened specifically for nonprofit groups and local officials involved in election integrity to report content that could discourage or interfere with voting.

Twitter quickly concluded that Mr. Trump had posted false information about mail-in ballots. The company then labeled two of his tweets, urging people to “get the facts” about voting by mail. An in-house team of fact checkers also assembled a list of what people should know about mail-in ballots.