Debunking Charlie Kirk on His Twitter Misinformation
On Sunday Oct. 18, 2020, Twitter suspended Charlie Kirk’s account. The president and founder of Turning Point USA was temporarily locked out of tweeting due to spreading misinformation about voting, a specific policy Twitter put into place this year.
Kirk’s tweet at 10:47 pm on Oct 17 [now blocked from visual access] said 327,000 “mail-in ballots” were rejected in Pennsylvania. In fact, 327,000 mail-in ballot applications were rejected. [The tweet was saved by Media Matters for America reporter John Whitehouse here.]
As usual, Kirk offered no link to any story in his tweet.
In interviews on Fox and CBN and on his 10/20 podcast episode, Kirk made similar claims about how this happened. Here are some quotes from his podcast:
Kirk said he tweeted something that was “originally from ProPublica” about “rejection of mail in ballots.” Then he added that story was “widely reported…” adding “it was re-written by many other reputable news agencies, and in the title it said ‘Pennsylvania rejects 327,000 ballots.’ So we just took the essence of the story that was widely reported and tweeted it out.”
He then adds: “Nineteen hours later it turns out the story added the word ‘applications’ to it.”
He made the same argument to Fox’s Steve Hilton on Hilton’s Sunday 9 pm show on Oct. 18, hours after the locked account began.
Nineteen hours before that Hilton show would have been would be 4 am EST, Oct. 18.
ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer first published at 5:30 am on Oct. 16.
There is no indication that they got their own story wrong.
So then what is Kirk referring to?
Whitehouse notes many conservative outlets got story wrong:
The conflation of ballot applications with ballots happened later, and only in the fever swamps. For instance, the Fox & Friends Facebook post which conflated them was sharing the Fox News article about the ProPublica story. It just took until Fox & Friends posted on Facebook on Friday evening for this particular misinformation to emerge. Then there were a number of others that ran the same false version over the course of Saturday, leading to Kirk’s tweet that evening, about 40 hours after the story broke.
That Fox & Friends Facebook post is still up as of 10.21 at 2:30 pm. But the Fox News story linked to in the post is correct, and has been from the start.
At least one conservative outlet that got the story wrong corrected its story.
The Blaze deleted its wrong tweet and put this atop its story:
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this post included a headline that read: “Pennsylvania rejects 372,000 mail-in ballots, leaving many voters confused: report.” That headline misrepresented the situation. There were 372,000 mail-in ballot applications rejected. The article has been updated with the correct information.
Kirk told his podcast audience that while he didn’t intend to mislead or deceive, this event was example of Twitter using its power to “silence opinions they do not agree with.”
This of course contradicts his other narrative he tweeted a “fact” that was corrected later. This also shows his own tweet is an opinion, not a fact.
Kirk also said that “literally” the headline of the story he [or his staff] saw was “Pennsylvania rejects [or rejected] 327,000 ballots.”
As you can see from my search on Google News, there has been no such headline:
At about 3pm EST on 10.21 Kirk deleted his tweet and his account was opened.
In a tweet video he repeated some of the claims above. He tried to associate false information about a picture of him and another man that went viral with this event. Twitter policy specifically denies false information about voting and elections. He is not comparing apples to apples, so to speak.
He told his podcast audience that admitting fault in this case would have negative consequences for the future of his account, something he said he noticed the last time this happened.
Kirk had a tweet deleted in March for spreading false information about Covid19 treatments.
Kirk offered no evidence for his claims about the future.
Twitter policy statements on this type of suspension mention no effects. See also its “civic integrity” policy. Twitter notes that “for severe or repeated violations of this policy, accounts will be permanently suspended.”
