It’s almost as if Donald Trump is trying to get impeached.

By Twitter, I mean.

But just as the internet companies have been gifted with a big hug of a law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which extends them broad immunity from controversial content that is posted on their platforms, Mr. Trump has been given an epic pass on Twitter for whatever he does.

That’s where the twitchy fingers of the president of the United States have been working overtime to try to get him tossed off the digital communications service by posting all kinds of rule-breaking things and often in all caps with lots of exclamation marks — just so we don’t miss them.

[Kara Swisher answered your questions about this column on Twitter.]

True enough. But that means that every day and literally twice on Sunday, it’s more incendiary tweets and rage-filled tweets and appalling tweets and reckless tweets and misleading tweets and inaccurate tweets and really inaccurate tweets. And the many lies as tweets — so, so many tweet lies.

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That’s the good part, because while many of those tweets barely skirt the line Twitter has drawn that pretty much everyone else must mind, many cross it, and President Tweeter remains unconcerned by a banishment that will never come.

Over the weekend Mr. Trump sank to a new low when he delivered a message — while cleverly hiding behind a quote from a controversial (and I am being kind here) pastor named Robert Jeffress — about the possibility of a civil war should he be impeached.

Read the tweet: “ … If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal. Pastor Robert Jeffress @FoxNews.”

Setting aside the fact that this country did survive the Civil War and major political upheavals like the resignation of President Richard Nixon, this was yet another egregious example of the kind of bad behavior that Mr. Trump is allowed to exhibit that no one else can get away with on the platform.

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More to the point, the president of the United States of America was able — without any consequence — to suggest there would be a domestic war that could result in deaths if he were subject to rules and laws — such as the whistle-blower statutes.

The trick was that the tweet’s message was implicit rather than explicit. And that is why Twitter did not remove the tweet, as it certainly could do. The company’s weak response shows how utterly incapable it is in dealing with these thorny issues.

It so happens that in recent weeks, including at a fancy-pants Washington dinner party this past weekend, I have been testing my companions with a hypothetical scenario. My premise has been to ask what Twitter management should do if Mr. Trump loses the 2020 election and tweets inaccurately the next day that there had been widespread fraud and, moreover, that people should rise up in armed insurrection to keep him in office.

Most people I have posed this question to have had the same response: Throw Mr. Trump off Twitter for inciting violence. A few have said he should be only temporarily suspended to quell any unrest. Very few said he should be allowed to continue to use the service without repercussions if he was no longer the president. One high-level government official asked me what I would do. My answer: I would never have let it get this bad to begin with.

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Now my hypothetical game has come much closer to reality. In using a quote to hide behind what he was actually trying to say, Mr. Trump was testing the system, using a tactic that is enormously dangerous.

It’s important to stress that what Mr. Trump is doing is no different from what various autocrats and haters around the world are doing with social media platforms to push their malevolent agendas. With this latest move by the troller in chief, with no reaction from Twitter, it’s official that the medium has been hijacked by those who want to take advantage of its porous and sloppy rules.

To be fair, I doubt the Twitter chief executive and founder Jack Dorsey could have imagined that a United States president would be so shameless and willing to cause harm by using the digital tools he built.

Well, Mr. Trump has — over and over again. And so it is incumbent on the giant social platforms to prevent the president from dangerously weaponizing their tools. If not, when the history of this era is written, they will be judged as completely failing in their duties as citizens.

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This is not to say that this is an easy situation for Twitter. I, too, would be daunted by the incredible responsibility that has been thrust upon the company. But here we are.

So, to help them figure it out, let me end with the words of Abraham Lincoln, who knew a thing or two about what civil wars really mean: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the Recode Decode podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing Opinion writer. @karaswisher • Facebook

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