Twitter is seeking to expand its product features and policies after President Trump repeatedly pushed a conspiracy theory regarding the death of a staffer who worked in former Rep. Joe Scarborough’s congressional office.
The social media platform apologized on Tuesday morning for the president’s insinuation via Twitter that Scarborough, now a television host on MSNBC, may have been responsible for Lori Klausutis’s 2001 death, which has prompted calls for the company to remove the tweets.
“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. “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 statement from Twitter came soon after it was revealed that Klausutis’s widower, Timothy, pleaded with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a letter sent last week to remove Trump’s tweets from the social media platform.
“Her passing is the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with in my 52 years and continues to haunt her parents and sister,” he said in the letter obtained by the New York Times. “There has been a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died.”
“The frequency, intensity, ugliness, and promulgation of these horrifying lies ever increases on the internet. These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage,” he continued.
In tweets this month, Trump asked whether Scarborough “got away with murder” and claimed it was why the MSNBC host stepped down from Congress. Scarborough, who has vehemently denied any involvement in the woman’s death, announced his resignation from Congress months before she died.
The president first shared the conspiracy theory in a November 2017 tweet in which he referred to Klausutis’s death as an “unsolved mystery” and urged for unspecified people to “investigate!” In a 2005 letter to Variety Fair, Scarborough said he had only met Klausutis three times and was never alone with her, in response to conspiracy theories that they had a love affair.
