Foreign

Trump accuses Facebook, Twitter, Google of Democrat bias

Published

5 years ago

December 18, 2018

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused tech giants Facebook , Twitter and Google of being biased in favor of opposition Democrats, a day after a report for the Senate revealed Russian agents had used social media in an attempt to sway the 2016 election in Trump ’ s favor .“ Facebook , Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous !” Trump tweeted .

“ Twitter , in fact , has made it much more difficult for people to join @ realDonaldTrump . They have removed many names & greatly slowed the level and speed of increase . They have acknowledged- done NOTHING!”

An analysis for the Senate Intelligence Committee released Monday described an organized campaign by the St Petersburg -based Internet Research Agency ( IRA ) to hurt Hillary Clinton , the Democratic nominee , by inflaming right -wing conspiracy theories and suppressing the vote of traditionally liberal groups such as African Americans .

The IRA – created account “ Blacktivist ” sent out messages such as : “ No lives matter to Hillary Clinton . Only votes matter to Hillary Clinton . ”

Separately , a portion of the 3 , 841 IRA accounts on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter and YouTube studied by the researchers sought to provoke Republican – leaning white Americans to get out and vote .

And after Trump took office Moscow’ s operatives took aim at Special Counsel Robert Mueller , head of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Trump ’ s campaign and Moscow, The Washington Post reported Monday .

Trump is a regular critic of social media and accused Twitter as recently as October of stifling the growth of his account by making it harder for users to follow him .

Marketing software firm SparkToro revealed in October that its analysis of his 55 million – plus followers had revealed that more than 60 percent were fake .

Around three – quarters of accounts that followed Trump had been in active for at least 120 days while 36 percent used Twitter ’ s default profile image .

( AFP )