Democratic nominee Joe Biden may not be as charismatic as President Trump on Twitter, but he’s quickly overtaking him in popularity.
New data from media intelligence company Conviva shared with the Washington Examiner shows Biden out-engaged Trump in average engagement per Twitter post in the last month. Between Sept. 13 and Oct. 13, Biden reached an average of 148,600 engagements, while Trump had 136,100 engagements per post.
The former vice president has also grown his follower base faster than Trump in the past two months, though the president still has 87.3 million followers, compared to Biden’s 11 million.
According to the data, Biden generated more likes than Trump per tweet, but Trump still had far more retweets.
For Instagram, Trump still strongly outweighs Biden, except in his growth of followers as the Democrat picked up more followers in August and September.
Facebook also had Trump having a strong advantage, but Biden is slowly building a decent following on that platform as well.
Trump has long used Twitter to express not only his opinions of lawmakers, political candidates, and media pundits but also to announce policy proposals and his travel schedule.
Though the president’s Twitter use has been widely criticized, Trump defended his use of the platform, saying he believes he does not get accurate or fair coverage of his presidency by most media outlets.
In a recent NBC town hall, Trump was asked by moderator and Today anchor Savannah Guthrie about his use of Twitter. She asked Trump about why he retweets content that may be viewed as conspiratorial or misinformation.
“I do a lot of retweets, and, frankly, because the media is so fake and so corrupt, if I didn’t have social media … I wouldn’t be able to get the word out,” Trump said.
While the president has also touted his Twitter use as a way of being transparent, he’s criticized the platform for occasionally issuing fact checks or warnings to his tweets, suggesting that it has a liberal bias. Social media’s fact-checking and content suppression has long been the ire of Republicans and conservatives who say they’re skewed toward censoring right-leaning content.
Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, told PolitiFact that Trump’s reasoning for using the platform to get around the media seems accurate.
Trump’s tweets are “a form of government-to-public communication that circumvents the free press,” Grygiel said.
