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Twitter and a journalist who is part of AFP Fact Check program both pushed false claims about the suspect in the Boulder, Colorado shooting.
Twitter often touts its efforts to crack down on so-called “misinformation.” This month alone, the platform has revealed that it has challenged more than 11 million accounts for posting what it deems to be “misleading information” about COVID-19 and announced a new strikes system where it will permanently suspend accounts that repeatedly post “false or misleading” tweets.
Yet in its Trending section, Twitter amplified false claims about the Colorado shooting suspect, a Syrian migrant, being white.
Not only did Twitter amplify these false claims but it also added additional “context” to the trending topic which stated: “People are comparing the arrests of the white male suspects at the center of the recent shootings in Boulder and Atlanta to the 2019 death of unarmed Black man Elijah McClain.”
This additional context is created by Twitter’s own in-house curation team.
Mainstream media fact-checkers such as AFP Fact Check also have the power to censor other users when they post information that the fact-checkers deem to be false.