NYT - Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain

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

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“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.

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The real issue is the very serious collateral damage of this fight, which is the post-mortem libel of Ms. Klausutis and the ensuing suffering of her husband and family. They are the victims, of Mr. Trump and of Twitter’s inability to manage its troubled relationship with him.

At least Mr. Trump is consistent in his lowering of the bar. As the number of Americans who have died from the coronavirus approached 100,000, the president declined to address the virus’s tragic toll and chose instead to keep up the series of tweets about Ms. Klausutis, all aimed at attacking Mr. Scarborough, who is now a high-profile MSNBC host.

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While I had thought throwing Mr. Trump off Twitter was not the worst idea — after all, what would the president do without his raging addiction to Twitter? — I have come to believe that a Trump ban would be pointless and too drastic.

Another solution being discussed inside Twitter is to label the tweets as false and link to myriad high-quality information and reporting that refute the tweets’ sinister insinuations.

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