Twitter and Trump on a collision course with the truth

Twitter, a service built around brevity and speed, is about to get a lot busier.

After seemingly ignoring every standard it had when it came to President Donald Trump’s most outrageous tweets, Tuesday night the company has posted its first fact check on a Trump claim that “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.” He goes on to say the November election “will be rigged.”

Normally the tweet would have a standard life cycle. Twitter would do nothing. Trump’s followers would retweet his post. Trump’s detractors would tweet insults and responses. The news media would extend the tweet’s reach exponentially even as they reported it was false. And then the president would tweet again.

But this time Twitter, already under fire for another false Trump tweet, announced that the president’s latest messages “contain potentially misinformation about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”