President Trump made his political career in part by leveraging his presence on social media, and on Twitter in particular, using it to get his message out directly to his supporters without the editorial filter of traditional media.
However, the president has expressed increasing frustration with Twitter in recent years, largely when users cause unflattering portrayals of him to trend on the platform. And, following a tumultuous press conference on Thanksgiving Day, President Trump fumed about Twitter, on Twitter.
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During the press conference, reporters confronted President Trump over his refusal to concede the 2020 election, among other things.
There to address the troops for the holiday, President Trump took the opportunity to reiterate his baseless, unproven, and evidence-free claims that the election was rigged against him.
“If the media were honest and big tech was fair this wouldn’t even be a contest and I would have won by a tremendous amount,” he claimed. “And I did win by a tremendous amount, but it hasn’t been reported yet.”
In a testy exchange with Reuters reporter Jeff Mason over whether Trump would concede when the Electoral College votes to confirm Joe Biden’s election win, the president snapped, saying “You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”
Between that outburst and the appearance of Trump behind a small desk, trends on Twitter were again unflattering for the president.
Soon, #DiaperDon started to trend, begun by anti-Trump group MeidasTouch. That hashtag was picked up by countless users and spread rapidly.
Among them was actor Mark Hamill, who tweeted , “Maybe if you behave yourself, stop lying to undermine a fair election & start thinking of what’s good for the country instead of whining about how unfairly you are treated, you’ll be invited to sit at the big boy’s table #DiaperDon.”
And so, in a late night rant, President Trump railed against his once-favorite platform.
“Twitter is sending out totally false ‘Trends’ that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative ‘stuff’. Same thing will happen to Twitter as is happening to @FoxNews daytime. Also, big Conservative discrimination!” he wrote.
Twitter makes no judgments on what should and should not trend; rather, the platform merely reports what’s being discussed most by its users, in terms of volume and how quickly that volume gathers.
The president also called for a repeal of an internet law that Republicans have increasingly decried.
“For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!” the president tweeted, referring to a portion of a 1996 internet law that protects platforms from being sued over what content their users post.
He did not elaborate about how he sees Section 230 as related to national security.
While Republicans have also called for a repeal of Section 230, citing a perceived anti-conservative bias, evidence suggests social media platforms cater more to conservatives to counter accusations of bias.
Facebook, for example, quashed an internal report over making the site less polarizing over fears those measures would target right-wing users disproportionately, The Independent reported. Right wing media figures regularly top Facebook’s top 25 daily most engaged pages.
That evidence hasn’t swayed President Trump from claiming bias against him, however, and he continues to make claims that have no evidence to back them up.