Even if former President Barack Obama tweeted less, a study by The Washington Post concluded that he is a better tweeter than current U.S. President Donald Trump. The newspaper used several metrics such as retweets a month, tweets per month, and retweets per tweet.
Following the uproar from the public over the unpresidential way that Trump uses Twitter, he defended himself and insisted that tweeting is a modern-day presidential model. A new poll by ABC News and The Washington Post said otherwise. The percentage of survey respondents who said Trump’s behavior is not like that of a president is an alarming 70 percent, while 24 percent considered his behavior "fitting and proper."
Twitter addiction
CNN noted that the addiction of Trump to Twitter is linked to people’s perception of his behavior as presidential or not.
Given his recent tweets such as the one when he commented that Mika Brzezinski’s alleged botched facelift made her bleed and his slamming CNN video resulted in 68 percent of the poll respondents described his tweets as "inappropriate." Another 65 percent found his Twitter posts "insulting," 52 percent consider his tweets "dangerous," but 21 percent said it is "refreshing."
Chances are those that those who feel Trump’s tweets are either inappropriate or insulting are among the 72,000 netizens who have signed an online petition that asked Twitter to ban Trump on the microblogging platform. Trump, however, will remain on Twitter, according to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, who said the president’s use of the microblogging site allows the real estate billionaire to have a real-time conversation with the world, CNN reported.
Trump appears to be the exception to the rule of Twitter that members who violated the platform’s terms of service were banned. At least three prominent users, including a political commentator, right-wing troll, and anti-feminist writer have been banished from Twitterverse. One possible reason why Dorsey wants Trump to remain on Twitter is he has more than 40 million Twitter followers – although half of them who followed Trump since February are suspected to be bots.
Attacking beyond Twitter
The Washington Post, however, reported that attacks would no longer be confined to Trump’s tweets. There is a plan to hit news organizations and pollsters by accusing them of publishing fake stories and conducting fake surveys if their articles and studies do not favor the president. The plan is to discredit some journalists who have been reporting on Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
The White House, according to Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, will "research previous articles" of reporters and exploit past mistakes or perceived biases. It would demand corrections, highlight the previous errors of the journalist on social media, and feed it to pro-Trump media such as Fox News. Spicer, as expected, denied the existence of a dossier on media.
