However when President Trump posted a veiled menace in January that Consultant Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, had “not paid the price, but” for serving to to spearhead an impeachment inquiry in opposition to him, Twitter didn’t put a warning on the tweet.
However when Mr. Trump falsely asserted final week that Michigan’s secretary of state had “illegally” despatched out absentee poll purposes for the November election throughout the pandemic, Twitter didn’t affix any labels on that message, both.
On Tuesday, Twitter’s dealing with of Mr. Trump’s tweets — or what some say has been a startling lack of dealing with — once more got here to the fore.
That was when the widower of Lori Klausutis, who died in 2001 from problems of an undiagnosed coronary heart situation whereas working for Joe Scarborough, a Florida congressman on the time, asked Twitter to delete Mr. Trump’s tweets about his late wife. Mr. Trump had posted false conspiracy theories about Ms. Klausutis’s death in recent days, suggesting that Mr. Scarborough was involved, as part of his long-running feud with the MSNBC host.
Twitter said it would not remove Mr. Trump’s posts about Ms. Klausutis, even as her widower called them “horrifying lies,” because they did not violate its terms of service. That echoed what the social media firm has repeatedly stated about its lack of motion on Mr. Trump’s posts: That whereas his messages might skirt the road of what’s accepted below Twitter’s guidelines, they by no means cross it.
The San Francisco firm’s newest refusal to take down Mr. Trump’s posts — which are sometimes riddled with falsehoods, inaccuracies and threats — highlights its conundrum with the president. Mr. Trump, who makes use of Twitter as his social media platform of alternative, has introduced consideration and development to the corporate. If Twitter deleted his tweets, it might escalate accusations from conservative politicians that it censors their political views.
Twitter creating a carve-out for public leaders is “misguided,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, who studies disinformation. “If world leaders are not kept to the same standard as everyone else, they wield more power to harass, defame and silence others.”
Twitter is in a tough spot, Ms. Donovan added. If it removed the president’s tweets, he could open an investigation into Twitter or fast-track regulations on the company. But allowing his tweets to remain could keep spreading the misinformation, she said.
That dilemma with Mr. Trump has put Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, under scrutiny. In a series of tweets last October, Mr. Dorsey said the company would ban all political ads from the service because they presented challenges to civic discourse, “all at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.” He worried such ads had “significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”
Yet Mr. Dorsey has appeared unwilling to tackle Mr. Trump’s tweets even though disinformation experts said political tweets from world leaders often reach a wider audience than political ads and have a greater power to misinform.
On Tuesday, Mr. Dorsey faced fresh criticism over Mr. Trump’s tweets about Ms. Klausutis. Apart from the plea from her widower, Timothy Klausutis, to remove the posts, Mr. Scarborough also called the tweets “unspeakably cruel.” Others, including Katie Couric and the CNN anchor Jake Tapper, expressed sympathy for the Klausutis household, with Mr. Tapper calling Mr. Trump’s tweets “malicious lies.”
“We’re deeply sorry concerning the ache these statements, and the eye they’re drawing, are inflicting the household,” a Twitter spokesman, Nick Pacilio, stated in an announcement. “We’ve been working to increase current product options and insurance policies so we will extra successfully tackle issues like this going ahead, and we hope to have these modifications in place shortly.” The corporate declined additional remark.
A number of the renewed criticism appeared to push Twitter to behave. On Tuesday afternoon, it marked two of Mr. Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots with a “Get the info” hyperlink to extra info.
Twitter isn’t the one tech firm combating moderating Mr. Trump’s threats and falsehoods on-line. Mr. Trump posted identical comments about Ms. Klausutis’s death on Facebook. One of his posts there gained about 4,000 comments and 2,000 shares and was not mentioned by Mr. Klausutis. On Twitter, that same post, which questioned whether Mr. Scarborough had gotten away with murder, was shared 31,000 times and received 23,000 replies.
Twitter faces singular pressure because it is Mr. Trump’s most frequently used method of communicating with the public. Early in his presidency, he tweeted about nine times a day, but has accelerated his pace, averaging 29 tweets a day last year and posting up to 108 times on May 10, according to a tally by The New York Times.
For years, Twitter took a hands-off approach to moderating the posts on its platform. That brought it acclaim when it enabled dissidents to tweet about political protests, like the Egyptian revolution in 2011. But it also allowed trolls, bots and malicious operatives onto the site, making Twitter an epicenter for harassment, misinformation and abuse.
During Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, his aggressive Twitter tactics attracted attention and were mimicked by his supporters. That led Twitter to clamp down on harassment and grapple with the kinds of political speech it would allow. Revelations about election interference and disinformation campaigns on Twitter during the 2016 campaign prompted further changes.
In 2018, Mr. Dorsey said he would focus on molding the platform to support “healthy” conversations.
“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” he tweeted on the time. “We aren’t happy with how folks have taken benefit of our service, or our incapability to handle it quick sufficient.”
However Mr. Trump himself has escaped enforcement. Though he has generally deleted his personal tweets after they include misspellings, Twitter has largely left his posts alone.
That hands-off remedy has been controversial inside Twitter. In 2017, a rogue Twitter employee deactivated Mr. Trump’s account. The account was reinstated in about 10 minutes.
Critics have piled on over time. Final yr, Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, requested Mr. Dorsey to suspend Mr. Trump’s Twitter account. In a letter to Ms. Harris, Twitter reiterated its public stance on tweets by world leaders and stated it might err on the facet of leaving the posts up if there was a public curiosity in doing so.
Different world leaders haven’t loved comparable freedom on Twitter. Tweets from the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, and the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, that promoted unproven cures for the coronavirus had been just lately eliminated.
Twitter has maintained that Mr. Trump doesn’t violate its insurance policies and that the corporate would take motion if he crossed the road.
“We consider it’s vital that the world sees how world leaders assume and the way they act. And we expect the dialog that ensues round that’s crucial,” Mr. Dorsey stated in an interview with HuffPost final yr. If Mr. Trump posted one thing that violated Twitter’s insurance policies, Mr. Dorsey added, “we’d definitely discuss it.”
Kate Conger reported from Oakland, Calif., and Davey Alba from New York. Ben Decker contributed reporting.