‘Delete president’s murder conspiracies,’ outraged widower urges Twitter over posts
PRESIDENT Donald Trump is again pushing the limits of Twitter’s attempts to deal with national leaders who spread misinformation and engage in personal abuse, this time with a barrage of baseless tweets suggesting that a television host he has feuded with committed murder.
Twitter, which has tried to devise penalties for such situations, has so far done nothing about Mr Trump’s tweets.
The husband of a woman who died by accident two decades ago in an office of then Republican congressman Joe Scarborough is demanding that Twitter remove the president’s tweets suggesting Mr Scarborough, now a fierce critic of Mr Trump, killed her.
“My request is simple: Please delete these tweets,” Timothy J Klausutis wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The body of Lori Kaye Klausutis, 28, was found in Mr Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach, Florida, congressional office on July 20, 2001.
Mr Trump has repeatedly tried to implicate Mr Scarborough, a host of MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ show, in the death, even though Scarborough was in Washington, not Florida, at the time.
It’s the latest instance in which the president has blown past Twitter’s half-hearted attempts to enforce rules intended to promote civility and ‘healthy’ conversation on its most prominent user.
Mr Trump frequently amplifies misinformation, spreads abuse and uses his pulpit to attack private citizens and public figures, but has never
‘My request is simple. Delete these tweets’
faced sanctions on his Twitter account.
Mr Klausutis wrote in his letter that he has struggled to move on with his life due to the ongoing “bile and misinformation” spread about his wife on the platform, most recently by Mr Trump.
His wife continues to be the subject of conspiracy theories 20 years after her death.
Mr Klausutis said in the letter, sent last week, that his wife had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work.
He called her death “the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with” and said he feels a marital obligation to protect her memory amid “a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died”.
He said Mr Trump’s tweets violate Twitter’s community rules and terms of service and “an ordinary user like me would be banished”.
At yesterday’s White House briefing, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany refused to say why Mr Trump was pressing the unfounded allegations or whether he would stop tweeting about them.
Instead, she focused on remarks that Mr Scarborough made about the case that she said were inappropriate and flippant.