Twitter says Trump’s tweets about congressional women of color don’t violate standards.

Company says his comments about minority members of Congress don’t violate terms

President Donald Trump’s tweets about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other minority congresswomen, in which he called for them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” will remain on Twitter amid the controversy they have caused.

Twitter won’t be removing them because it determined they don’t violate its terms of service, although the company said Monday — during which the hashtag #RacistPresident was among the top trending topics — it would have no comment about the matter.

Neither has Twitter applied a label to Trump’s tweets under its new policy, announced last month, which would add a disclaimer to political leaders’ tweets that the company deems to have violated its rules. Twitter’s rules include no attacks on others “on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

Twitter has yet to label any tweets under its new policy, which also is supposed to downgrade the visibility of the tweets.

Twitter has rarely taken action against Trump, who has 61.9 million followers on the @realDonaldTrump account he has had since before he became president, despite many calls to rein him in or even ban him because of his tweets. He has attacked minorities, women, individuals including former Secretary of State Hill

ary Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former President Barack Obama — and many others — on Twitter. The San Francisco-based company has said multiple times that the president’s tweets are newsworthy, although in 2017 it did remove a couple of his retweets amid a crackdown on some far-right accounts.

“What they’ve said is that they’re going to keep his tweets up and they will exempt him from their standards because of ‘public interest’,” said Malkia Cyril, founder and executive director of Center for Media Justice, an Oakland-based media and civil rights advocacy group, in an interview Monday. “But public interest also includes holding officials accountable. There’s nothing holding the president accountable.”

“Trump’s consistent targeting and abuse of women of color in congress is not only vulgar, reckless and shameful — it’s flat out dangerous,” said Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director for Color of Change, another civil rights advocacy group founded in Oakland. “Twitter choosing not even to label his content what it is, is just more proof they can’t be serious about fixing a problem of their own making.”

Trump on Sunday targeted the Democratic U.S. congresswomen with a tweet thread that did not specify their names, but it was understood that he was talking about OcasioCortez, who hails from the Bronx in New York and is of Puerto Rican descent, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who were all born in the United States, plus Rep. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia but became a U.S. citizen in 2000 when she was a teenager. The four have been clashing with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Trump exploited that rift.

Monday, the president doubled down and said the four congresswomen have themselves been guilty of “(spewing) racist hatred,” and suggested that they apologize to him.