Widower asks Twitter to delete Trump tweets

The husband of a woman who died in the office of then-GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough is asking Twitter to remove President Donald Trump’s tweets that suggest Scarborough murdered her. Yahoo Finance's Dan Roberts shares the details.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: I want to talk about another debate that's going on between Washington and Silicon Valley and other parts of the country. It has to do with the tweets from President Trump, which have caused controversy before. But now they are on a particular topic that's causing even more. It has to do with a former staffer of Joe Scarborough, now the MSNBC host.

This is a woman who died many years ago. The president has been tweeting accusations that there was foul play. The woman's widower actually came out with a letter and said, please, President Trump, stop doing this. And Twitter, we want you to delete these tweets. Dan Roberts, I know you've been watching this situation. And a little bit of a different spin here in the request to delete the tweets, instead of taking the president off the platform.

DAN ROBERTS: Yes. Delete the tweets is the request from the woman's widower. And this woman died back in 2001. As you said, she worked for Joe Scarborough back when he was a politician. Nowadays he co-hosts "Morning Joe," obviously. And President Trump was an initial kind of, I guess fomenter of this conspiracy. He tweeted about it, as we're discussing. But it's really his son, Donald Trump Jr., who has continued the tweets, and really amplified the issue to his followers.

Now the letter asked Twitter to delete the tweets in question, and then Kara Swisher, our colleague in tech media, wrote an opinion column at "The Times" about the same issue. And I think it's complicated, you know, as is always the case. And it's an unsatisfying answer. But we talk about this all the time. I mean, what responsibility do platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram have to take down content that is false and misleading?

And usually, the cop-out, or many people think it's a cop-out, is, well, we're just a platform. And people can post what they want on our platform, but we're not in the business and the habit of policing speech. That's what Facebook likes to say. And in this case, we're talking about Twitter. But that can only go so far when someone is spreading misinformation that is basically akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater, right? I mean, the fear and the likelihood is that these tweets from the president and from his son lead people to start looking into this, harassing the family, I mean, we've seen this happen before with Pizzagate, for example.

Now my own response and my own thing I'd say to start with is, Twitter is not about to ban the president or suspend his account. I mean, that's what people always try to go to first. That's just not going to happen. Now, could Twitter delete just these two or three tweets about this woman from the president's account? Maybe. But I would say.

ADAM SHAPIRO: But Dan.

DAN ROBERTS: Would say that the latest, is that Twitter gave a statement on the issue that is basically a non-statement. I just want to share this before you guys chime in. "We're deeply sorry about the pain these statements and the attention they are drawing are causing the family." And then Twitter says, "we've been working to expand existing product features and we hope to have changes in place shortly." That's basically a non-answer. That's, for now, we're doing nothing. And I understand people wanting immediate action.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let me pose it this way though, and read the letter from the husband. It's very moving. But what if this were on the flip side? If you allow that, those tweets to be deleted, could people say, well, why aren't you deleting the tweets about the Steele dossier, which has been proven in a lot of ways, to have been false?

DAN ROBERTS: Exactly right, Adam. I mean, as I said, they're not about to spend the president's account. I meant to go a step further. I don't even think that Twitter is going to delete these tweets from President Trump. Now, maybe Twitter could do something to try to get some PR points, like publicly urging the president to delete them or asking him to choose to delete them. And then Twitter gets to say, see, we did our part, and now it's in his hands.

But I don't think they're about to delete them, because then you start a whole new precedent. Well, if you delete those, what about these other ones, what about this? And it's really, you know, again, it's not easy, and I'm not letting these companies off. But I just think it's important. I think sometimes people who so vociferously say, you know, shame on Twitter, shame on Facebook, delete this misinformation, they act as though it's a simple binary issue. It's not easy for these companies. Because once you take action against free speech, then you open a whole new can of worms. So I don't expect Twitter to at least forcibly delete the tweets in question.

JULIE HYMAN: Right. There's also the idea that they might put some kind of disclaimer attached to the tweets, as Facebook has done with some of its posts.