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One thing we know for sure about Donald Trump is that he doesnt change. On Tuesday, he was back on Twitter claiming that an expansion of mail-in voting would lead to rampant voter fraud and regurgitating a groundless conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, was involved in the murder of a former member of his staff, Lori Klausutis, who died in 2001. In another Tweet, Trump threatened to close down Twitter and other social-media platforms if they silence conservative voicesby which he means if they take away his right to spread all sorts of lies and smears in the run-up to November.

Trumps demagogic use of social media has been a blight on American democracy for years, of course, but the stakes are now bigger than ever. With a little more than five months left until the election, he is behind in the polls and struggling to overcome the popular perception that he mishandled the coronavirus pandemic. The official mortality toll is about to hit a hundred thousand, and, due to uncounted deaths, the real toll is almost certainly higher. In these circumstances, Trumps relection prospects hinge on his ability to rewrite history, create diversions, and vilify his political opponents and critics. Like Squealer, the propagandist pig in George Orwells Animal Farm, Trump is asking the citizenry to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and believe made-up tales. What is different is that Trump is using social media to distribute to his followers their daily diet of disinformation, resentment, and incitement.

On Tuesday morning, when Trump took to Twitter, he had little reason to believe that his posts would provoke anything other than the familiar reactions: thousands of angry comments, tens of thousands of likes, and some tut-tuts from his media critics. The unwillingness of the big social-media platforms to rein him in is so well established that it has descended to the level of a bad joke. To companies like Twitter and Facebook, politics is a revenue stream, and the stream flows fullest when the politics is bitter and divisiveor, in a word, Trumpian. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook shut down an internal team of researchers after it had warned the companys leadership that the platforms algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. Twitter, for its part, has repeatedly promised to remove false and incendiary material, but it has also conspicuously failed to apply its rulebook to the political arsonist in the White House.

On Tuesday, Twitter took a small step in the right direction, by flagging the factual inaccuracy of a pair of Trumps tweets about mail-in ballots and voter fraud. Underneath these tweets, it inserted a blue exclamation mark and a link that read, Get the facts about mail-in ballots. If you click on this link, you land on a page with the headline Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud and also links to a series of articles contradicting the Presidents claims. The company said that these alerts were in line with a previously announced pledge to apply fact-checking labels to tweets that contain misinformation.

But, for some unexplained reason, Twitter didnt flag another Trump tweet, in which he claimed that he had provided the nations governors with unlimited Testing for the coronavirus, which also was a blatant lie. And the company refused a written request from the widower of Lori Klausutis to take down Trumps tweets about his late wifes death, which Trump has used to smear Scarborough, despite the fact that Scarborough was eight hundred miles away when it happened. Klausutis worked in Scarboroughs Florida office when he was a Republican congressman. A medical examiners report said that she died of a blood clot in the brain subsequent to a fall precipitated by heart disease. Trump picked up on an Internet conspiracy theory that the death was a homicide, and that Scarborough was involved. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so, Trump wrote a couple weeks ago. On Saturday, he urged his followers to keep looking into the death of Klausutis, who worked in Scarboroughs office when he was a Republican congressman. On Tuesday, he again referred to Scarborough as Psycho Joe, adding, So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I wont bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?

In his letter to Twitters C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, Timothy Klausutis pointed out that the conspiracy theory about his wifes death had caused a great deal of anguish to her family. Even some loyal Republican voices blanched at Trump promoting it. We suppose there are some Trump followers who enjoy this, the editorial page of the New York Post said. The libs say horrible things about you, go ahead and say terrible things about them! There is a difference, though, between mocking someones ratings and hurting an innocent family with the memories of their tragic daughter because of a petty feud.

Scarborough told the New York Times that Trumps calls for a police investigation of one of his political critics had echoes of Vladimir Putins Russia and Viktor Orbns Hungary. Timothy Klausutis said that, if an ordinary Twitter user like him had posted something so incendiary, he would have been banned from the platform. Twitters list of rules explicitly states that users may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. And yet Twitter refused to take down Trumps tweets on the flimsy grounds that Scarborough is a public figure.

To an amoral serial offender such as Trump, that is an invitation to keep at it. As long as he targets people in the public domain, he can evidently say anything he wants, and amplify any conspiracy theory that appears from the feverish swamps of the alt-right. In a redux of the 2016 Pizzagate disinformation campaign, Donald Trump, Jr., recently posted on Instagram a meme that accused Joe Biden of being a pedophile. Facebook, which owns Instagram, took no action against Trump, Jr. How long before his father joins in? If the social-media companies dont do more to meet their responsibilities as publishers and de-facto public utilities, it probably wont be long. There is no sewer so vile that Trump wont wade into it, dragging the entire country along. Thats another thing we know about him.

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Fact-Checking Donald Trump on Twitter Wont Stop His Demagoguery - The New Yorker