Twitter issues Trump its first fact-check label

Twitter on Tuesday slapped a fact-check label on President Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time, a response to long-standing criticism that the company is too hands-off when it comes to policing world leaders.

The move was made in response to two Trump tweets over the past 24 hours. The tweets falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Twitter’s label says, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” and redirects users to news articles about Trump’s claim.

Twitter’s actions come on a day when Twitter was facing a barrage of criticism over another set of Trump tweets.

In a letter to Twitter, last week, Timothy Klausutis, widower of Lori Klausutis, said the president had violated Twitter’s terms of service by suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough killed Lori Klausutis in 2001 when he was a Florida congressman and she was an intern in his office.

Lori Klausutis, then 28, died as a result of a heart condition that caused her to collapse at work and hit her head on her desk.

Twitter said it would not remove the president tweets as Timothy Klausutis requested.

“An ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform for such a tweet,” Timothy Klausutis wrote in the letter to Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, which was published Tuesday by The New York Times opinion writer Kara Swisher, “but I am only asking that these tweets be removed.”

Trump has promoted the conspiracy theory against Scarborough, who has criticized the president on his MSNBC show Morning Joe. In a series of tweets over the past several weeks, Trump has urged law enforcement authorities in Florida to “open a cold case” and suggested that Scarborough “got away with murder.” He had tweeted about the same conspiracy as far back as 2017.

“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,” Klausutis wrote in his letter to Dorsey. “My wife deserves better.”

Twitter said Trump’s tweets did not violate the company’s terms of service, even though its policies say users “may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so.” In tweets over the weekend, Trump encouraged his audience to “keep digging” into the circumstances of Lori Klausutis’ death and suggested that it may have been linked to “an affair.”

Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, his wife and cohost, discussed the letter on their show Tuesday morning, expressing support for Klausutis. They said they had been in touch with Twitter officials, and a Twitter spokesman confirmed the conversations.