Trump is spreading a murder conspiracy to the horror of a widower. Jack Dorsey's stance will cost him
In Reason in Common Sense, the 20th century philosopher George Santayana gave us the oft-paraphrased warning that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
It’s a sentiment which has largely been eschewed by some of our most celebrated inventors and businesspeople, who, like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, are often lauded as great disrupters whose strength lies in their willingness to ignore what has come before them.
And Twitter, the company which made Dorsey a household name, has certainly been disruptive.
When I first wrote about Twitter in July 2008, it was because some lawmakers didn’t know what to make of the service — which some other members of Congress were already using to communicate directly with constituents — and were making an ill-advised attempt to regulate how legislators used then-nascent social media platforms.
My boss at the time, an old-school, ink-stained print veteran straight out of central casting, didn’t know what to make of it either, and told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to see any more “stupid [expletive] Twitter stories”.
But the disruptions kept on coming, and within a decade it could be said without irony that Jack Dorsey’s company had built a platform on which Donald Trump had risen to the presidency. Indeed, throughout Trump’s presidency, Twitter has remained his favorite tool, as well as the preferred platform of those who cover him.
Yet there has long been a dark side to Trump’s prodigious use of the service. By many accounts, his hold over the Republican Party despite myriad investigations, an impeachment trial, and scandal upon scandal comes not from his ability to persuade, but from fear of his ability to whip a significant portion of his 80 million followers into a frenzy.
Since he took the oath of office in January 2017, skeptical lawmakers have fallen in line one by one after seeing him make political mincemeat of once-mainstream GOP figures such as ex-Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and South Carolina’s Mark Sanford. Prior to a series of Trump tweets calling him out for criticizing the president, Sanford had been popular enough to win back his old House seat after being forced to resign the state’s governorship in disgrace. Twitter was the turnaround.
But Trump’s ire has not solely been directed at politicians who displease him. Over the past few years, he has been indiscriminate in choosing who to single out for his mobs to abuse. Whether they’ve been career civil servants, parents of slain US service members, or journalists trying to do their jobs, he has shown no compunctions about shining a spotlight on people, even if they are not public figures and lack a comparable platform on which to respond.
For the past week, he has issued multiple 280-character missives in promotion of a conspiracy theory about the 2001 death of a congressional staffer called Lori Klausutis.
According to a Florida medical examiner’s report, Klausutis’ untimely death at the age of 28 was a tragic accident brought on by an undiagnosed heart condition, which caused her to faint, hit her head, and expire from the effects of an “acute subdural hematoma,” or bleeding on the brain.
To her family, it was and still is a painful tragedy. But because her death occurred in the Florida district office of then-Representative Joe Scarborough, now an MSNBC cable host and vocal Trump critic, it is also a cudgel with which Trump can, as his defenders like to say, “counterpunch” by libelously implying that Scarborough — who was in Washington at the time of her death — was responsible for it.
Lori’s late husband, Timothy Klausutis, is neither a television news host nor a businessman-turned-politician with 80 million Twitter followers, but in an impassioned letter sent to Dorsey last week, he implored the Twitter CEO to “please delete these tweets”.
“I'm asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain. I would also ask that you consider Lori's niece and two nephews who will eventually come across this filth in the future. They have never met their aunt and it pains me to think they would ever have to “learn” about her this way,” he wrote. “My wife deserves better.”
While a Twitter spokesperson said the company is “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” the company said it would neither remove the offending tweets nor label them “misleading information,” a “disputed claim” or an “unverified claim.”
Such indifference is par for the course for Twitter, which has long turned a blind eye to inauthentic activity, harassment, threats, and worse on its platform, particularly when inspired by or in support of Trump or his allies.
This, dear readers, is where Dorsey would do well to heed Santayana’s warning.
For years, prominent conservatives have been engaged in a concerted campaign to “work the refs” by casting any attempt on the part of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others to prohibit or discourage harassment, abuse, disinformation, threats, hate speech or the like as “censorship”.
According to The Washington Post, ex-George W Bush White House official Joel Kaplan, now head of Facebook’s DC office, nixed an early attempt to remove the made-up “news” sites which had spread dozens of false pro-Trump stories in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” Kaplan reportedly said during an internal video conference call regarding the anti-fake news project.
And a report last year by Vice News revealed that Twitter executives have heretofore declined to employ the algorithmic tools developed to find and remove Isis propaganda against white supremacist content “because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians,” though the company denied that such a rationale reflected any official company policy.
Yet the gaslighting continues. House and Senate Republicans frequently make false claims of “censorship” and have introduced legislation to condition the immunity from defamation suits enjoyed by most web-based companies if they fail to demonstrate that their enforcement of terms of service is politically neutral. And Trump, who once promoted a false claim of censorship by Google which first appeared on a Russian propaganda network, is reportedly considering forming some manner of “panel” to keep this fake issue alive.
The reason it continues, as Timothy Klausutis has learned, is because it gets results. Trump’s libelous tweets remain online, while Facebook has labeled a conservative group’s viral ad criticizing him “false”.
What Dorsey and other social media executives must learn is that this placating behavior never ends well for those doing the placating.
They should take a history lesson from an industry they’ve disrupted and frequently dismiss: Media.
For decades, the American press has laboured under a non-stop barrage of abuse and bullying from the right, which endlessly castigates journalists and their employers as hopelessly liberal.
Whether it’s Nixon’s conduct during Watergate, Reagan’s during Iran-Contra, George W Bush’s phantom weapons of mass destruction or neglect during Hurricane Katrina — or the endless Trump scandals arising during his 2016 campaign or after — we are castigated for reporting stories which reflect negatively on Republican officeholders, while failing to adopt a breathless tone about the slightest gaffe from a Democrat.
And instead of defending our work as truly objective, the press has time after time acted to placate such bad-faith critics by striving for “balance” instead. It’s why 2016 was dominated by reporting about Hillary Clinton’s emails despite a series of gaffes and scandalous revelations about then-candidate Trump which would have doomed any other campaign.
Rather than call a non-story what it is, outlets amplify them because to do the right thing by being truly objective about it would give bad-faith actors ammunition to accuse them of having a liberal bias.
And has such constant acquiescence gotten the press a reprieve? No. But the vicious cycle continues because no one is willing to say “enough,” and so the conspiracies spread further and further, and the demands become more and more incessant.
Still, Jack Dorsey, a great disrupter, doesn’t appear to have much desire to absorb the painful lesson to be learned from studying the press and the past.
Learning it — and acting on that knowledge — could be painful. There will be criticism. There will be those bad-faith critics, and there could be worse, given Trump’s propensity to use government to reward friends and hurt enemies.
But like the biblical David to whom startups are so often compared, standing up to a bully — even a Goliath at the head of the executive branch — is a far more likely path to victory than the alternative. If Dorsey is brave enough to change things now, he may be hailed a hero in decades to come.
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