Kara Swisher: Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/trump-scarborough-twitter.html

The president is spreading a vile conspiracy theory on the platform. Maybe Twitter should finally hold him to its rules.

By Kara Swisher

May 26, 2020

“Please delete those tweets,” the widower begged in a letter last week to Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey. “My wife deserves better.”

Yes, Twitter, Lori Klausutis certainly does deserve better, nearly two decades after she died in a tragic accident that has morphed into a macabre and continuing nightmare for her husband, Timothy Klausutis.

The boogeyman plunging him and the family of his late wife into the very worst of memory holes is a conspiracy-theory-loving, twitchy-fingered and often shameless tweeter who also happens to be the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

“President Trump on Tuesday tweeted to his nearly 80 million followers alluding to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough. The son of the president followed and more directly attacked my wife by tweeting to his followers as the means of spreading this vicious lie,” wrote Mr. Klausutis, in a letter sent to Mr. Dorsey on Thursday that I obtained over the weekend.

“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the president of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain.” (You can read the letter in full here.)

Mr. Klausutis deserves an answer from Mr. Dorsey, who has the unenviable task of sorting out what is perhaps unsortable, which is to say, the ugly heart of Twitter’s most famous customer. While sources close to the company said executives had been trying to figure out what to do over the weekend, the company has at this writing been silent about this latest controversy involving Mr. Trump’s appalling and rule-breaking Twitter habit.

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[dewsgirl]

1. K and R

[True Blue American]

2. Twitter has allowed Trump to spew lies and hateful attacks for 4 years now!

It is time to boycott or shut them down! Dorsey should be sued for allowing Trump to spew his unrelenting hate and lies. Bankrupt him. Facebook, too.

[gademocrat7]

3. K&R

Ban the evil man baby.

[samnsara]

4. i havent blocked trump* but i wont follow him either..did ppl report his tweet yet?

[brooklynite]

5. Sadly, I've seen the same rumor mongeriing here when Scarborough was out of favor...

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/10026854526

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2823029

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4024943

[Blue_Adept]

16. Indeed

I called some out on it a few months and was roundly castigated, reminding me why I visit less and less after twenty years of membership.

[Eyeball_Kid]

17. That's correct.

In the past, I have done that myself. I was emotional, ugly, and disrespectful, and I regret it. I appreciate brooklynite for pointing out the fact that some of us have done an injustice to Scarborough and the Klausutis family. Scarborough may have been, and likely IS, a craven opportunist who, especially in the beginning of Trumpy-boy's rise, sacrificed his integrity for financial security. That's a separate story. It's also quite likely that the story of the death of Klausutis had nothing to do with Scarborough and was accidental. I'm letting it go.

[bucolic_frolic]

6. Trump tweets are the digital equivalent

of knee-capping

[samplegirl]

7. I really doubt that twitter will do

anything other than stay silent like they’ve been doing.

[FakeNoose]

8. It seems Joe Scarborough has grounds for a lawsuit against Chump

Has this been pursued I wonder? He has grounds for slander and libel.

Maybe Scarborough can take Twitter to court and force them to shut down Chump's Twitter account?
Man oh man, that would be the day!

[Eyeball_Kid]

18. Scarborough also has grounds, IMO, for a lawsuit against Twitter and Dorsey.

Dorsey is violating HIS end of the contract, otherwise called a Terms of Service agreement.

I'm not a fan of any of these characters. But what gets me is Dorsey's decision to treat Trumpy-boy as a special case that doesn't need to adhere to his TOS, that he's privileged and elitist, and is able to flaunt common decency according to his own whims and desires.

[bucolic_frolic]

9. Social media may seem young, but it's not

In early internet days, Yahoo message boards struggled with the same disinformation, lies, even hate speech. Users could vote posts up or down, and eventually those voted down sunk to the bottom of the pile. But armies of trolls, right wingers far more organized and numerous than the left, would tweak the dialogue to fave the right.

Message hosts such as Discus use a system of voting up but not voting down. Maybe it's an improvement, but the right still rises and there is always the method of flooding dialogue with extreme right positions.

Twitter is no different. The nonsense posted there is harmful to sanity, logic, truth, facts. No company could pay enough employees to monitor traffic. They enforce with a few high profile examples.

Maybe limiting people to one account and 10 posts a day would help. But you know, armies of Rethugs ....

Maybe everyone will realize social media is wasting their time, not improving their minds, and is only useful for actual factual information when they can find it.

We shouldn't keep our heads in the sand. We need to be aware of opposing views, they can make us stronger, and make us appreciate diversity. But no one plays by the rules anymore.

[warmfeet]

10. K & R

[2naSalit]

11. K&R

[Mr. Sparkle]

12. How do you deal with something like that. The President of the United States using

your dead wife as a prop. That's tough. My heart goes out to him.

[blakstoneranger]

13. Here We Go Again--THEY'RE CHEATING!

He's creating more bad press, why? I think the fix is in and rump knows it. The russians (or some foreign country) have control of our election system and are planning to put this clown back in office. With the help of barr and others. He knows, that's why he makes no attempt at being even a little presidential. The more rump talks about a fix election, the more I'm convinced he's right--IT'S FIXED FOR HIS BENEFIT--THE FIX IS FOR HIM.

[sop]

14. (Twitter) Dorsey and (Facebook) Zuckerberg only make more money from these controversies.

They hide behind the "we only provide the platform, we're not responsible for the content" crap, pretending they only care about free speech. Trump drives traffic to Twitter, Dorsey will never remove him. Dr. Klausutis should sue Twitter.

[Blue_Adept]

15. Considering how many people here have used Lori Klausutis's name recently

I hope they feel some real shame for doing so. What happened to her has long been the Seth Rich conspiracy theory of the left.

[DallasNE]

19. Facebook Has The Same Problem

The Whitehouse account is misinfortational as well, telling lie after lie. And the taxpayers fund those lies. If that was a corporation they could be held liable. But not brand Trump.

[Martin Eden]

20. Trump is a vile troll

No decent person should want him to be president.

[Blue Owl]

21. Imagine pea-brain without his precious twitter

How else could he throw his little under-developed, stunted tantrums?

That rotten, moldy walnut he calls a brain can't handle anything more than 160 characters...