"thinly sourced" Say Twitter

I wasn't going to comment on the Fake News pushed by Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, but now I have to do so.  Lawrence breathlessly announced on his show that he had a source who told him that Deutsche Bank had tax returns for President Trump that showed he had paid no taxes for many years among other things.  It's not worth going through all that Lawrence said, because it isn't true.  In fact, by the end of the show, Lawrence obviously had gotten push back and was forced to admit that his story hadn't been fully checked out.  Now it turns out that Lawrence never saw the documents in question.  In fact, his source has never seen those documents.  It's now pretty clear that the documents don't contain any of the President's tax returns.  That means that none of Lawrence's story about the documents is true.  It's totally fake news.

So why am I compelled to write about this?  Lawrence was trending on Twitter, and the geniuses at that platform summarized the reason he was trending as his need to "comment" on a "thinly sourced" story he had on his show last night.  Twitter just couldn't bring itself to discuss the need for Lawrence to "retract" and apologize for the story which had turned out to be totally false.  If I were to post that aliens from Venus had landed and taken control of the UK, would Twitter call that thinly sourced if I had no source?  That's what they did with Lawrence.