On Fox Business, Donald Trump Blasts Twitter and Claims Bias in Favor of Democrats

WASHINGTON, June 26, 2019 – President Donald Trump on Wednesday unleashed baseless allegations of censorship against Twitter, claiming that the social media giant somehow makes it harder for people to follow him and for him to communicate with his followers.

During a extensive phone interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump was asked to comment on a viral video depicting a Google executive speaking about the company’s desire to combat foreign propaganda and misinformation. Many conservatives have claimed that combating foreign propaganda is akin to preventing Trump’s reelection.

But the president changed the subject to Twitter, which he said did something “incredible” to him.

“I have… millions and millions of followers, but I will tell you, they make it very hard for people to join me in Twitter and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message,” said Trump, who has about 61.4 million followers on the site.

The President offered no explanation of how Twitter makes it hard for people to follow him or for him to communicate with them. He said that Twitter executives “are all Democrats,” and said that because of that, the platform they run is “totally biased” in favor of members of the Democratic party.

“If I announced tomorrow that I’m going to become a nice liberal Democrat, I would pick up a five times more of a following,” he said, while again offering no evidence to support his claim.

He also said that Twitter was responsible for a drop in the number people who were beginning to follow his tweets. He provided no evidence for conscious activity on the part of Twitter.

“I was picking up 100,000 followers every few days and all of a sudden, and I’m much hotter now than I was a number of months ago. Then all of a sudden that stopped, and now I pick up a lot, but I don’t pick up nearly what I did,” he said.

One possible reason for the drop in the number of new people following him might be that fewer people are interested in following him.

According to Axios, data from Crowdtangle shows that Trump’s “interaction rate” on Twitter dropped from the 0.55 pecent his tweets posted in November 2016 to 0.32 percent in June 2017.

The same data shows his interaction rate has continued to tumble, and was as low as 0.16 percent as of May 25, 2019.

(Screenshot of Trump on Fox Business Network.)