To President Trump, the size of his Twitter fan base is evidence that Silicon Valley is trying to rig the 2020 election against Republicans.
While the real estate mogul-turned-politician’s personal following of more than 61 million users is the 12th-highest worldwide, it would be bigger still if the San Francisco-based social media platform weren’t inhibiting his performance, he told Fox Business personality Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday.
“I have millions and millions of followers, but I will tell you they make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter; they make it very much harder for me to get out the message,” Trump said. “If I announced tomorrow that I was going to become a nice liberal Democrat, I would pick up five times more followers.”
Twitter has repeatedly denied such accusations, noting that workers attempt to keep the platform healthy by removing fake accounts employed to manipulate or harass users. That sometimes leads to smaller follower counts for prominent posters, the company has said, but boosts user confidence.
The president’s comments marked the latest round in the conflict between Republicans and Silicon Valley, whose biggest firms have consistently rejected claims of bias against conservatives that were raised when they began flagging and removing phony accounts after the 2016 election. Some had been created by Russian operatives to sway voters in Trump’s favor, U.S. intelligence agencies said, and others were designed merely to fuel partisan conflict.
“They talk about Russia because they had some bloggers,” the president said during his telephone interview with Bartiromo. “By the way, those bloggers, some of them were going both ways — they were for Clinton and for Trump.”
The more pressing concern is that Silicon Valley firms are “trying to rig the election,” the president said. “That’s what we should be focused on, not the phony witch hunt,” he added, referring to an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Mueller’s report, which was released in April and cited numerous contacts between campaign officials and Russians, said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support conspiracy charges. The special counsel declined, however, to absolve Trump of obstruction of justice, citing testimony that he attempted to steer as well as to end the investigation.
Trump, who has dismissed coverage of the investigation that he disliked as fake news, has garnered support from congressional allies in his claims of Silicon Valley bias over the past few years. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced a bill this month that would strip tech platforms of immunity for content posted by users unless they prove they’re “politically neutral.”
And in a Tuesday hearing called by the Senate subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet, Sen. Ted Cruz — a Texas Republican who fought Trump for the 2016 presidential nomination — cited documents and video from Project Veritas that Google executives were working together to prevent another “Trump situation.”
Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses covert information-gathering techniques, has been accused of selectively editing and misrepresenting its findings. Its founder, James O’Keefe, pleaded guilty in 2010 to entering the office of then-U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, under false pretenses.
“These documents raise very serious questions about political bias at the company,” Cruz said.
Trump himself has suggested responding by regulating Google and other tech companies with new laws as well as suing them.
“Twitter is just terrible, what they do. I’ve had so many people come to me, ‘Sir, I can’t join you on Twitter.’ I see what’s happening 100%,” he said Wednesday. “It’s amazing that I won the election.”
The president, however, doesn’t have to depend on a Congress deadlocked between House Democrats and Senate Republicans to improve his following, branding consultants have told the Washington Examiner.
He might win more followers simply by indulging in fewer tweetstorms, which can quickly suck up all the space on a smartphone screen, following more of the people who follow him, and adopting a less divisive tone.
“One key thing that stands out right away is the follow-back ratio,” said Dave Kerpen, the chairman of consultant Likeable Media and the author of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks), a New York Times bestseller.
While Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, has more followers (reportedly the source of some of Trump’s angst), the former president himself follows 613,000 people.
Trump follows only 45, which is the “equivalent of people putting their hand out to take your hand and you rejecting them,” Kerpen said. “He’s essentially telling people that they’re not good enough, smart enough, or interesting enough for him to bother following them back.”
Obama has the world’s second-largest Twitter following, 106 million, surpassed only by singer Katy Perry, who has 107 million followers.
As for the president, his tweets have consistently garnered print, radio, and television news coverage. His Twitter posts on Iran, for instance, made the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
