COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 17/05/2019
Jon Allsop
In claiming that social media platforms demonstrate anti-conservative bias, Republicans have found a reliable generator of right-wing outrage. President Trump, the whiner in chief, feels personally mistreated by social media, despite having said that he wouldn’t have been elected without it. In a meeting last month, Trump reportedly asked Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, why he’d been losing followers; Dorsey replied that everyone loses followers sometimes as Twitter sweeps the platform for bots. The following week, Trump went on a tirade after Facebook banned accounts linked to “conservative thinkers” like Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos.