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Trump Reportedly Used His Meeting With Twitter's CEO To Complain About His Followers

by Chelsea Stewart
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As Twitter tries to get a handle on the number of spammy accounts out there, some of its users have been seeing a drop in followers. Not everyone is happy about this, either — including, reportedly, President Donald Trump. According to The Washington Post, he expressed his concerns to the head of Twitter during a chat on April 23 and from the sound of things, Donald Trump's meeting with Twitter's Jack Dorsey was awkward AF. Elite Daily reached out to the White House for further comment on the meeting, but did not receive a reply.

Dorsey traveled to the White House on Tuesday, April 23 to discuss Twitter's efforts to stop the opioid crisis, but according to the Post, Trump reportedly had something more important on his mind: his decrease in followers. A source, who spoke to the publication under the condition of anonymity, claimed that a "significant" portion of their meeting was centered around Trump's concerns that the social media platform had deliberately removed his followers. The president also reportedly said he knew of other conservatives who had experienced a drop in followers.

Twitter announced plans to remove suspicious followers in July 2018, saying in a statement that larger follower counts could experience a more "significant drop" than smaller followings. Dorsey reportedly stressed this to Trump again in their meeting, even noting that he himself had lost followers as a result of the purge.

The result of that reported conversation was unclear, but Trump seemed to be in a good mood later that evening, tweeting that he and Dorsey had had a "great meeting." Dorsey followed up by thanking the president for their discussion, adding that Twitter intends to be "healthier and more civil."

It's refreshing to see, because the message Trump shared about Twitter just before the meeting was not happy. In the morning of April 23, he tweeted that Twitter is "very discriminatory" and that it doesn't treat him "well" as a Republican. Trump went on to say that his follower count would be much higher "if Twitter wasn't playing their political games." Yikes.

He might not be happy with the purge, but Twitter's Legal, Policy, Trust, and Safety Lead Vijaya Gadde said via statement in July 2018 that it was an ongoing and global effort to "build trust and encourage healthy conversation on Twitter." Gadde added: “We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation."

Twitter also explained at the time that certain profiles had been blocked because of sudden changes in behavior. Those changes included sending out a large number of unsolicited replies, sharing misleading links, or being blocked by a large number of accounts that have been mentioned by the user.

Trump has seemingly ignored those statements, though. The same month, he reportedly accused Twitter of "shadow banning" (hiding) prominent conservatives from search results. In a public statement, Twitter denied the practice, saying that they did not "shadow ban" in general and they "certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."

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What makes it worse? It doesn't appear that the president has been that affected by the purge. In July 2018, Trump had 53.4 million followers. He reportedly lost 100,000 in the immediate wake of the purge, but at the time of this writing, he's up to nearly 60 million followers.

It's not so bad, is what I'm saying. And I have a feeling his account will continue to grow from here.