S2E14: Episode 3: "The Twitter Dodge"
Conspiracyland
Yahoo News
4.4 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2020
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode explores how, once President Trump started tweeting about Scarborough and Lori Klausutis, devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory took up the cause and started spreading even more bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theories claiming that Klausutis had been “suffocated” after she read secret documents about the 9/11 terror attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. The episode also examines how Twitter has come under pressure over its handling of Trump’s tweets — an issue that the company was finally forced to address after T.J. Klausutis wrote a poignant letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him to remove the president’s tweets about his wife from the company’s platform. And it includes an exclusive interview with Lt. Mark Hayse, the chief of investigations at the Fort Walton, Fla., Police Department, rejecting Trump’s call to reopen the case.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the last episode of Conspiracy Land, we told you how T.J. |
| 0:09.2 | Cloussutis, tormented by the tweets by President Trump, accusing |
| 0:12.9 | former Congressman Joe Scarborough of killing his wife. |
| 0:16.5 | Came up with the idea of writing his letter to Jack Dorsey, |
| 0:20.0 | the CEO of Twitter, pleading with him to take down the falls and offensive comments from the company's site. |
| 0:26.0 | All I'm left with is writing a letter and trying to appeal to the humanity of the president of Twitter or CEO or whatever his title is. |
| 0:42.0 | That's all I was left with. |
| 0:44.0 | But even as T.J. was crafting that letter, an army of conspiracy theorists who feed off the president's |
| 0:50.0 | tweets were taking the Scarborough-Clau Suda's story in strange new directions. |
| 0:55.0 | It's a phenomenon that has come up time and again during the Trump presidency. |
| 0:59.0 | Trump tweets and his loyalists in the political world and his allies on social media see them as a call to action, |
| 1:06.0 | riffing on and embellishing their leaders often baseless charges, |
| 1:10.0 | serving as the President's digital megaphone. |
| 1:13.0 | It's a process that poses awkward questions for the country's social media giants. |
| 1:17.0 | What are their responsibilities when this happens? |
| 1:20.0 | When lies are sprinkled like breadcrumbs on their company's platforms. |
| 1:24.3 | And how in particular has Twitter and its soft-spoken billionaire chief executive |
| 1:29.3 | Jack Dorsey handled these issues? |
| 1:31.7 | We'll delve into these questions on this, the third and final episode of Conspiracy Lands, |
| 1:37.0 | A Death in Florida brought to you by Sculluggery. |
| 1:49.4 | Episode 3, Chapter 7, Bizarro World. |
| 1:59.6 | Well, my name is Jack Berkman. I'm a lawyer and a political strategist in Washington, D.C. Some may even call me a conspiracy theorist. |
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