Widower Asks Jack Dorsey to Remove Trump’s False Tweets. Twitter Says No.

The widower of Lori Klausutis, whose death President Trump has used to smear the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, is asking Twitter to remove the president’s tweets on the subject.

Twitter said on Tuesday that it would not.

In a letter to Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, last week, Timothy Klausutis said Mr. Trump had violated Twitter’s terms of service by falsely suggesting that Mr. Scarborough murdered Ms. Klausutis in 2001 when he was a congressman and she was an intern in his office. Ms. Klausutis, 28, actually died as a result of a heart condition that caused her to collapse at work and hit her head on her desk.

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

Mr. Trump has repeatedly promoted the conspiracy theory against Mr. Scarborough, who has criticized the president on his MSNBC show “Morning Joe.” In a series of tweets over the past several weeks, Mr. Trump has urged law enforcement in Florida to “open a cold case” and suggested falsely that Mr. Scarborough “got away with murder.” He had tweeted about the same false 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,” Mr. Klausutis wrote in his letter. “My wife deserves better.”

Twitter has long been hesitant to remove posts from world leaders, even when they contain disinformation. The company has said posts from leaders are newsworthy.

There have been exceptions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic: In March, Twitter deleted posts by Presidents Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil in which they promoted unproven cures for Covid-19. But it has not deleted any of Mr. Trump’s posts.

Twitter said, for example, that Mr. Trump’s assertion that hydroxychloroquine showed “tremendous promise” in treating Covid-19 did not violate its policies because it was not a clear call to action that would harm the public.

Mr. Dorsey has faced multiple calls over the years to remove Mr. Trump’s misleading or false statements from the platform, including the president’s suggestion during a White House briefing last month that injecting disinfectant or using ultraviolet light could combat the coronavirus. Though Mr. Trump did not write about those subjects on Twitter himself, his statements led to a flood of other posts, videos and comments about false virus cures, which Twitter and other social media companies largely left standing.

Twitter clarified its policy this month, stating that it would label tweets containing misinformation about the virus, including those posted by world leaders, with three broad categories: “misleading information,” “disputed claim” and “unverified claim.”

But the company said it would not label Mr. Trump’s tweets about Ms. Klausutis.

“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesman, Nick Pacilio, said in a statement in response to Mr. Klausutis’s letter. “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”

Mr. Pacilio did not elaborate on what changes the company would make to its product or policies.