Established Fact
The internal logs for Jira ticket EIP-713 reveal a clear timeline showing that Twitter was tagged for action 20 minutes before the incident was officially fact-checked:
- At 2:51 PM on November 3, 2020, the EIP team escalated the issue, explicitly stating, “We are sending this to you quickly as we likely won’t be able to figure out a factcheck here”.
- Just two minutes later, at 2:53 PM, a participant stated, “This just doesn’t look like an official ballot box to me so I am tagging Twitter – after an initial survey this looks questionable at best”.
- It was not until 3:13 PM that actual verification was provided, with a participant noting, “Here is confirmation from the election official that the movement of ballots was official and authorized”.
Later that afternoon at 4:20 PM, the ticket notes that Twitter had “limited the original tweet” and the EIP team subsequently alerted Facebook to target the claim on their platform as well. This sequence confirms that the initial request for Twitter to review the content was made based on a preliminary assumption rather than a completed fact-check.