Trump claims his loss of Twitter followers proves anti-conservative bias

Image: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

Just a day after taking to Twitter to complain that Google search results are biased against him, President Donald Trump is once again going after the search engine, as well as Twitter and Facebook.

This time, he’s citing his very personal experience of having lost followers on social media as evidence of a broad scale anti-conservative bias.

While talking to reporters at the White House today, President Trump was asked a question concerning his tweets from Monday. He’d accused Google of offering “RIGGED” search engine results to anyone looking up the phrase “Trump News.” The president complained that Google was deliberately censoring “Republican/Conservative media” and showing search results that were critical of him from what he called the “Fake News Media.” 

“I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter, I think they treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly,” said Trump before explaining how this hits close to home: “I could tell you that I have personal experience. I have a lot of people on the various platforms.” 

How many?

“160 million people. I have numerous platforms. That’s a lot of people,” said Trump upon being informed by White House social media director Dan Scavino of his total follower count across his accounts on various social media platforms. “But I can tell you when things are different. And all of a sudden you lose people and you say, ‘Where did they go?’ They’ve taken off.”

“Now, I don’t know if it happens to the other side,” he said. The president then specifically called out Google, Facebook, and Twitter for this alleged anti-conservative bias.

Leaving aside the fact that Trump is conflating a search engine with social media platforms, from personal experience, we can say without a doubt that yes, people on the “other side” — Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists — have lost Facebook and Twitter followers at one point in time. 

Not only can people choose to follow and unfollow whomever they want on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms at anytime they like, we also have a very good example of this happening “to the other side” earlier this summer during the Twitter purge, when the site removed inactive accounts and fake profiles from users’ follower counts. When all was said and done, Barack Obama actually ended up losing many more followers than Donald Trump.

However, conservatives, backed up by the president of the United States, continue to accuse tech companies of unfounded bias. It’s something that’s really taken off in recent months, and doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. 

In fact, at the time of this post, Donald Trump tweeted out this latest criticism of Google.

In case you were wondering, no, Google did not censor Trump’s State of the Union addresses.