An analysis of President-elect Trump’s media diet shows that a large portion of the links that he shares on Twitter are from Breitbart.com or similarly right-leaning sites.
The report by Buzzfeed News analyzed the hyperlinks shared on Trump’s Twitter account since he announced his candidacy in June 2015. Buzzfeed found the stories tweeted by Trump “suggest that he is unfazed by news of questionable accuracy, likely to rely on hyper-partisan news, and apt to promote mainstream news only when it validates his opinions.”
The site that Trump tweeted the most was Breitbart, whose former CEO Steve Bannon was recently brought on as Trump’s senior White House adviser.
While Trump shares articles from mainstream sites — the Washington Post was his second largest shared site — the report found that his “preferred content seems to be right-leaning, hyper-partisan sites and opinion blogs” as well as a few “obscure personal blogs.”
The right-leaning sites that Buzzfeed cited Trump frequently sharing were the Daily Caller, Newsmax and the Gateway Pundit. The Washington Examiner was often shared as well, matching the number of links Trump shared to Fox News.
The report also found that Trump’s preferred news source was Twitter itself. Nearly half of the hyperlinks shared on Trump’s Twitter account were from Twitter URL’s, which show Trump frequently retweeting his fans. A separate report by Fortune found that at least 75 of his retweets were of white supremacists and a false claim about gun violence demographics.
Trump has been criticized for sometimes sharing false news or information, which has become a lightning rod of controversy after the Republican’s surprise win on Nov. 8. Buzzfeed News also published a report that claimed fake news skewed the results of the election.
