Joe Biden said that he supports Twitter fact-checking President Trump’s tweets, particularly those propagating a conspiracy theory that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of a former staff member.
“I’m of the view that social media companies have to reexamine whether or not — for example, if you put something out saying that same outlandish thing that the president thinks a talk show host on a cable committed murder, I mean, you’d say, ‘There’s no evidence for that at all, zero,'” the former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said in a CNN interview on Tuesday.
“I think they should” take action, Biden said. “I think they should say when things are patently not true, they should say so.”
Later on Tuesday, Twitter put a fact-check alert on Trump’s tweets talking about mail-in voting, the first time it has done so for the president.
The company, however, told ABC News that it has no plans at this time to put a similar alert on the tweets about Scarborough.
“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “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.”
The widower of the woman who died in Scarborough’s congressional office in 2001 sent a letter to Twitter last week, asking the company to delete Trump’s tweets about her. An autopsy found that the woman had an undiagnosed heart condition and hit her head on a desk while falling to the ground.
In tweets this month, Trump asked whether Scarborough “got away with murder” and suggested it was why the former congressman left office soon after, despite Scarborough announcing his resignation months earlier.
