Outspoken conservative rocker Ted Nugent has accused Twitter's fact checkers of lying when the social media platform called President Donald Trump's tweets "potentially misleading." Late last month, Twitter flagged two of Trump's tweets that claimed mail-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud, saying that the move stemmed specifically from the possibility that the tweets might "confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process." Twitter added a note at the bottom of each tweet, reading "Get the facts about mail-in ballots," which linked to a Twitter Moment fact-check. "Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud," read the heading. Trump later claimed Twitter was "completely stifling FREE SPEECH" by adding a fact-check underneath his tweets and he threatened to "strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen." Last week, Nugent discussed the episode during an interview with America's Voice News host Tudor Dixon. Speaking about Trump's attempts to push back against Twitter and other Internet and social media giants like Facebook and Google, Nugent said: "When he is now identifying the Nazi communism of censorship, a control of leftist liberals of the free speech of conservatives… What President Trump is doing is really reflective on the Nugent family. During [Trump's 2016 presidential] campaign, I had between 20 million and 36 million reach on Facebook. After the president was elected, I've been knocked down to only three million reach, and they keep playing with that, because they bring in these lying fact checkers who need their facts checked. "The president tweeted the truth — the evidence is irrefutable that widespread mail-in voting, it does create fraud, and people have been convicted of that fraud. So what the president said was true. The fact checkers lie. So God bless President Trump." According to FactCheck.org, experts have said that voter fraud via mail-in ballots is rare, though more common than in-person voting fraud. Both Democratic and Republican officials overseeing the mail-in voting process have told NBC News that Trump is wrong in his claims that an election with increased mail-in voting could not possibly be legitimate. Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, who oversees the elections in one of the nation's leading vote-by-mail states, told NBC News that her office detected about 140 instances of fraudulent voting out of roughly 3.2 million ballots cast in the 2018 election. Trump has repeatedly used Twitter to peddle inaccuracies, including a long-discredited tale that links former U.S. Representative-turned-MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to the accidental death of a young woman who worked in his congressional office. Of the 18,000-plus false or misleading claims Trump has made as president, more than 3,300 of them were made in tweets, according to The Washington Post.
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