Trump is turning Twitter into a state disinformation machine

Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims during the entire 2016 election, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. He is now turning Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation.

In the middle of a rant about the Electoral College, President-elect Trump tweeted a preposterous claim: that millions of people voted illegally in the election he just won. (He also trashed democratic norms before the election, saying it would be rigged and that he would not accept the results if he lost.) President-elect Trump made the false claim about illegal voting in the middle of saying there should be no vote recount in Wisconsin. President-elect Trump has given no indication that he will restrain his careless speech or improve his standards for evidence. He has used Twitter to tweet and retweet false and misleading information at a volume that has challenged the bandwidth of fact checkers. In many cases the fact-checkers don’t get a word in before the false claim. When President-elect Trump becomes President, his Twitter account won’t just be the ramblings of a private citizen — it will be the remarks of the chief executive of the US government. And if his Twitter account is the most open part of his administration, the platform could effectively become the White House press office.