in addition to disputing misleading claims made by us president donald trump about mailin ballots this week twitter has added factchecking labels to thousands of other tweets since introducing the alerts earlier this month mostly on posts about the coronavirus the company does not expect to need additional staff for the undertaking twitter spokeswoman liz kelley said on saturday nor is it partnering with independent factchecking organisations as facebook and google have to outsource the debunking of viral posts flagged by users social media platforms have been under fierce scrutiny over how they police rapidly spreading false information and other types of abusive content since russia exploited the networks to interfere in the 2016 us presidential election factchecking groups said they welcomed twitters new approach which adds a get the facts tag linking to more information but said they hoped the company would more clearly lay out its methodology and reasoning on friday ceo jack dorsey acknowledged the criticism saying he agreed factchecking should be open source and thus verifiable by everyone in a separate tweet dorsey said more transparency from the company was critical the companys move to label trumps claims about mailin ballots separates it from larger competitors such as facebook which declares its neutrality by leaving factcheck decisions to thirdparty partners and exempts politicians posts from review to a degree factchecking is subjective its subjective in what you pick to check and its subjective in how you rate something said aaron sharockman executive director of us factchecking site politifact who said twitters process was opaque twitter telegraphed in may that its new policy of adding factchecking labels to disputed or misleading coronavirus information would be expanded to other topics it said this week after tagging trumps tweets that it was now labelling misleading content related to election integrity twitters kelley said the team is continuing to expand the effort to include other topics prioritising claims that could cause people immediate harm a twitter spokesman said the companys trust and safety division is tasked with the legwork on such labels but declined to give the teams size this week twitter defended one of these employees after he was blasted as politically biased by trump and his supporters over 2017 tweets twitter also drew trumps ire for putting a warning over his tweet about protests in minnesota over the police killing of a black man for glorifying violence an enactment of a 2019 policy that was longawaited by the sites critics in the tweet trump warned the mostly africanamerican protesters that when the looting starts the shooting starts a phrase used during the civil rights era to justify police violence against demonstrators facebook did not take action on the same post the twitter spokesman said decisions on the labels are made by a team of executives including sean edgett twitters general counsel and del harvey the vice president of trust and safety ceo jack dorsey is informed before actions are taken the companys curation team aggregates tweets