Trump Used His Meeting with Jack Dorsey to Complain About Losing Followers - DMT NEWS

Breaking News

Trump Used His Meeting with Jack Dorsey to Complain About Losing Followers



On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with Donald Trump at the White House for a closed-door meeting. As it turns out, the trip was more an elaborate customer service call than anything else. Per the Washington Post, which interviewed a person with direct knowledge of the meeting, "a significant portion of the meeting focused on Trump’s concerns that Twitter quietly, and deliberately, has limited or removed some of his followers."

Trump, the Post noted, also told Dorsey that he had heard from other conservatives who had lost followers. In effect, the President of the United States of America, leader of the free world, invited the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur to the White House because he was in a huff about his follower count. According to the Daily Beast, Trump "has repeatedly griped to associates about how [Barack] Obama, has had more Twitter followers than he has, even though—by Trump’s own assessment—he is so much better at Twitter than Obama is upset that Barack Obama still has more followers than he does." Obama currently has 106 million followers to Trump's 59 million.

Ever since Twitter started banning some white supremacists, some conservatives have claimed that the website is unfairly singling out people on the right, either by banning their followers or algorithm-ing them into obscurity—a conspiracy theory called "shadow banning." (In the last major purge of locked accounts, Obama lost 2 million followers while Trump lost 200,000, and there is no clear evidence of Twitter targeting conservatives for exile.) In the meeting, according to the Washington Post, Dorsey had to give Trump a remedial lesson on Twitter, explaining that "follower figures fluctuate as the company takes action to remove fraudulent spam accounts," and noting that "even [Dorsey] had lost followers as part of Twitter’s work to enforce its policies."

After the meeting, Trump tweeted, "Lots of subjects discussed regarding their platform, and the world of social media in general. Look forward to keeping an open dialogue!" Dorsey replied, "Thank you for the time. Twitter is here to serve the entire public conversation, and we intend to make it healthier and more civil. Thanks for the discussion about that."

Dorsey's use of the word "civil" is pretty odd given the context of Trump on Twitter, especially when the platform frequently gives Trump a pass for things that would get other users banned. Trump regularly singles out individuals for tirades, which would seem to violate Twitter's rule on abusive behavior: "we prohibit behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice." His incendiary tweets about Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, connecting her to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, are still up. Last summer, Trump threatened to wipe out Iran, with an all-caps tweet: “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKE OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”

But Twitter, as it states on its website, has a separate policy for world leaders. In a statement in January 2018, the company wrote, "Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate." And Dorsey himself told employees before the meeting, "Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn’t take this meeting at all. In the end, I believe it’s important to meet heads of state in order to listen, share our principles and our ideas."

Of course, there may be a less idealistic metric involved, too. Trump get tons of attention, responses, and engagement nearly every time he tweets. And Twitter, which saw a massive spike in stock price this week after it announced larger-than-expected user growth, gains more business value from that than it does with "healthier and more civil" conversation.

http://bit.ly/2WrfIpH April 24, 2019 at 02:44PM