Social media use by Donald Trump
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Business and personal 45th President of the United States
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Donald Trump's use of social media has attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in 2009, with the handle @realDonaldTrump having over 88.9 million followers by 2021.[1] He frequently tweeted during the 2016 election campaign and as president, until his ban in the final days of his term.[2] Over twelve years (from the creation of his account in May 2009 until his permanent ban in January 2021), Trump tweeted around 57,000 times,[3] including more than 25,000 times during his presidency.[4] A spokesman for Trump said that Trump's tweets were considered "official statements made by the President of the United States."[5]
In the name of "public interest,"[6] Trump's Twitter account remained unmoderated for most of his presidency.[7] Trump often posted controversial and false statements on Twitter.[8][9][10][11] An investigation by The New York Times published November 2, 2019, found that, during his time in office, Trump "retweeted 217 accounts that have not been verified by Twitter," at least 145 of which "have pushed conspiracy or fringe content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended by Twitter."[12] On July 16, 2019, the House of Representatives voted to censure him for "racist comments" he had tweeted two days previously. Four Republicans supported the measure, while 187 voted against it.[13] His advisors warned him that his tweets may alienate some of his supporters.[14] In a June 2017 Fox News poll, 70 percent of respondents said Trump's tweets hurt his agenda.[15][16] In a January 2019 UMass Lowell poll, 68 percent of all respondents aged 18–37 said Trump tweeted too much.[17]
In 2020, Trump began spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, and falsely suggested that postal voting or electoral fraud may compromise the presidential election, prompting Twitter to either remove or label such tweets as disputed.[18][19] After his election loss, Trump had persistently undermined the election results in the weeks leading to Joe Biden's inauguration.[20][21] His tweets played a role in inciting the January 6, 2021, attack of the U.S. Capitol during the formal counting of electoral votes.[22] Though Trump was eventually acquitted during his second impeachment, social media companies began imposing semi-permanent bans against Trump effective January 8, 2021. Twitter permanently suspended his @realDonaldTrump handle, followed by the official account of his campaign (@TeamTrump) shortly thereafter.[23][24][25] Allies of Trump who posted on his behalf, including Trump campaign digital director Gary Coby, also had their accounts suspended.[26] Twitter also deleted three tweets by Trump on the @POTUS handle[27] and barred access to the presidential account until Joe Biden's inauguration. Along with similar measures against key allies of Trump, this resulted in a 73% decline in the spread of election-related misinformation during the first week following the bans (January 9–15), according to research analytics firm Zignal Labs.[28] In May 2021, Trump launched "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump", a site where he posted short tweet-like announcements; it was shut down after less than a month amidst reports that it had failed to attract significant traffic. In June 2021, Trump's permanent ban from Facebook and Instagram[29] was redacted to two years, or until January 2023.[30]
Background
Donald J. Trump 
@realDonaldTrump My use of social media is not Presidential – it's MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
July 1, 2017[31]
 | This article or section possibly contains synthesis of material which does not verifiably mention or relate to the main topic. (June 2021) |
The emergence of social media has changed the way in which political communication takes place in the United States. Political institutions such as politicians, political parties, foundations, institutions, and political think tanks are all using social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, to communicate with and engage voters. Regular individuals, politicians, "pundits" and thought leaders alike are able to voice their opinions, engage with a wide network, and connect with other likeminded individuals.[32] According to Wael Ghonim, social media can reinforce pre-existing beliefs rather than promote new ones. Social media, while a great source of gathering volunteers and money, serves the main purpose of affirming political beliefs and strengthening a political base.[33] Politicians have a platform to communicate with that is different from the mainstream media. Politicians have the ability to raise large amounts of money in relatively short periods of time through social media campaigns. In 2012, President Barack Obama raised over a billion dollars for his campaign, which broke the fundraising record. Around $690 million was raised through online donations including social media, email, and website donations, and more money was raised from small donors than ever before.[34]
The 2008 US presidential election was the first election in which candidates utilized the Internet and social media networking as a communicative tool incorporated into candidates' campaigns.[35] In 2008, President-elect Barack Obama was the first to use the Internet to organize supporters, advertise, and communicate with individuals in a way that had been impossible in previous elections.[36] Obama utilized sites like YouTube to advertise through videos. The videos posted on YouTube by Obama's were viewed for 14.5 million hours.[36][37] As of 2012, more candidates were utilizing a wider array of social media platforms.[38] Politicians were now on social networking sites like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other new social media tools and mobile apps. Some of the candidates used social media sites to announce their candidacy. Barack Obama emailed a video to 13 million when he announced his intention to run for re-election, and Mitt Romney sent out a tweet.[38] By May 16, 2011, @BarackObama was followed by 7.4 million people, including twenty-eight world leaders.[39] His account became the third account to reach 10 million followers in September 2011.[40][41][42]
From his official declaration of candidacy in 2015, Donald Trump benefited from large numbers of supporters active on social media. Some supporters called themselves "Centipedes" online.[43]
As president, Trump preferred to communicate over social media, announcing policy changes and the dismissals of staff members there.[44] Trump largely bypassed the White House Press Secretary, and his administration ended the daily White House press briefing.[44] Trump preferred "to dictate and dominate the news cycle"; his communications emphasized his political grievances, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked those he regarded as enemies.[44]
Trump used the retweet feature on Twitter to forward messages he agreed with (often posts praising him), no matter how obscure their authors were.[45] At times, Trump retweeted himself,[46] and sometimes commenting "so true" while doing so.[47]
Followers
The @realdonaldtrump handle had amassed 88.7 million followers by the time Twitter suspended it in January 2021 after the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[1][48][49]
When Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, he had 2.98 million followers; his follower count thereafter increased rapidly.[50] Many of his followers, however, were fake accounts and Twitter bots: a May 2017 analysis concluded that, out of the then-30.9 million followers of Trump's personal Twitter account, 51% were real and 49% were fake.[51][52] In mid-2018, Twitter conducted a site-wide crackdown on fake accounts, reducing the total number of users of the site by about 6%;[53] as a result, Trump lost about 100,000 of his then-53.4 million followers.[50] Trump repeatedly complained about reductions in the number of followers, claiming that Twitter was biased against him, and raised his complaints in tweets and in a private meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.[53][54] In October 2018, the research group SparkToro estimated that more than 60% of Trump's followers were "bots, spam, inactive or propaganda"—a significantly higher percentage than for followers of other American politician Twitter accounts.[54]
Rate of tweets
In November 2016, shortly after winning the election, Trump said in a 60 Minutes interview that, as president, his use of social media would be "very restrained, if I use it at all."[55] Trump went on to Tweet more than 25,000 times during his presidency;[4] by the first half of 2019, he was tweeting as frequently as he had as a candidate, and he doubled this rate during the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020. On his most prolific day, June 5, 2020, he tweeted 200 times.[56]
Tweets counted through Trump Twitter Archive.[57]
| Date range | Tweets | Daily average |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 (May 4 – December 31, 2009) | 56 | 0.2 |
| 2010 (January 1 – December 31, 2010) | 142 | 0.4 |
| 2011 (January 1 – December 31, 2011) | 774 | 2.1 |
| 2012 (January 1 – December 31, 2012) | 3,531 | 9.6 |
| 2013 (January 1 – December 31, 2013) | 8,138 | 22.3 |
| 2014 (January 1 – December 31, 2014) | 5,773 | 15.8 |
| 2015, pre-candidacy (January 1 – June 15, 2015) | 3,701 | 22.3 |
| Candidacy (June 16, 2015 – November 8, 2016) | 7,794 | 15.2 |
| Transition (November 9, 2016 – January 19, 2017) | 364 | 5.1 |
| Presidency, Year 1, first half (January 20 – July 19, 2017) | 1,027 | 5.7 |
| Presidency, Year 1, second half (July 20, 2017 – January 19, 2018) | 1,576 | 8.6 |
| Presidency, Year 2, first half (January 20, 2018 – July 19, 2018) | 1,472 | 8.1 |
| Presidency, Year 2, second half (July 20, 2018 – January 19, 2019) | 2,146 | 11.7 |
| Presidency, Year 3, first half (January 20 – July 19, 2019) | 2,814 | 15.6 |
| Presidency, Year 3, second half (July 20 – January 19, 2020) | 5,151 | 28.1 |
| Presidency, Year 4, first half (January 20 – July 19, 2020) | 6,014 | 33.2 |
| Presidency, Year 4, second half (July 20 – January 8, 2021)
Trump's account was permanently banned on January 8. "Daily average" is based on the 172 days he had an account. |
5,993 | 34.8 |
In addition to the tweets he put out, he was also the intended recipient of tweets by others. In 2019, Donald Trump was tagged on Twitter at a rate of 1,000 times per minute, according to The New York Times.[12]
Device security
After the inauguration, the White House would not comment on whether Trump was using a secure phone.[58]
Before, he had been using a Samsung Galaxy S3 which only has Android 4.3.1 as its latest OS, a version of Android which Google marked as unsupported and discontinued as of Trump's inauguration.[59] Since then, he has used an iPhone to use Twitter.[60]
The iPhone Twitter app used by Trump in 2018 lacked certain security features, and Politico reported in May 2018 that Trump's phone "has gone as long as five months" without being checked by security experts.[61]
On October 24, 2018, The New York Times reported that Trump was still using his personal iPhones for phone calls, even though his aides and U.S. intelligence officials have warned him that Russian and Chinese spies are listening.[62] Trump responded by tweeting: "I only use Government Phones." The tweet was sent from an iPhone.[63] (In the same tweet, he claimed that he has only one such government phone and that it is "seldom used.")[64]
Trump's @realDonaldTrump Twitter account was breached twice by Dutch hacker Victor Gevers, both times by guessing weak passwords. The first incident took place in 2016, using the guessed password "yourefired". The password was guessed because it had previously been discovered in a 2012 LinkedIn password breach.[65] The second incident took place in October 2020, when his account was breached by guessing the password "maga2020!".[66][67] Although reports of the second attack were denied by Twitter and the White House, they were later confirmed by Dutch prosecutors in December 2020.[68]
Tweets as official statements
Throughout his presidency, Trump frequently appeared to issue orders through his tweets. Whether these tweets were official directives was unclear.[69][70] A US National Archives spokesman said that Trump's tweets are considered presidential records.[71]
In 2017, the Department of Justice argued in one court case that Trump's tweets were "official statements of the President of the United States."[72] In another cases, the DOJ argued they were official policy statements but that the tweets were also "personal conduct that is not an exercise of state power."[72] The ABA Journal wrote in 2017, "There's little caselaw on to what extent government use of social media can be considered official or a 'public forum,' which affords First Amendment protection to people who might be excluded based on their viewpoints."[72]
In 2019, the Secretary of the U.S. Navy said he did not interpret a Trump tweet as a "formal order to act" after Trump tweeted that the Navy should not take away Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher's status as a Navy SEAL.[73]
In 2020, a court asked that Trump clarify his intention after he tweeted what appeared to be an order calling for the disclosure of documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a court filing White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that: "The President indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents."[74]
Timeline
In 2009, marketing staffer Peter Costanzo suggested to Trump that he could use social media to draw attention to his book, Think Like a Champion, which was due to be released later that year. He was unable to use the username @DonaldTrump, as it was already being used by a parody account. He and his marketing team decided to use the username @realDonaldTrump.[75] Trump joined Twitter in March 2009 and sent out his first tweet on May 4, 2009, advertising his upcoming appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, which was due to air a couple of days later.[75]
From 2009 to 2011, tweets posted by the @realDonaldTrump account included the phrase "from Donald Trump" to distinguish them from those written by his staff, but by about June 2011, as Trump's use of the platform increased, those identifying labels disappeared.[75] During the 2016 campaign, some tweets were sent from an Android phone, and others from an iPhone.[76][77] The Android tweets were more likely to be sent outside of business hours and to take a more combative tone. The iPhone tweets were suspected to be written and sent by members of Trump's staff, a suspicion that was largely confirmed using sentiment analysis;[78] machine learning and natural language processing could still frequently distinguish Trump's tweets from others sent in his name, even when staffers attempted to emulate his writing style.[79]
In 2012, following the victory of Obama in the presidential election, Trump tweeted a chain of disparaging comments about Obama's win. He mocked Obama for playing basketball and blamed the Chinese for creating "the concept of global warming". Trump tweeted the next day, "but we'll have to live with it!" and: "We have to make America great again!"[80] In response, Obama sarcastically quipped on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno: "This all dates back to when [he and Trump] were growing up together in Kenya," referring to the birther conspiracy.[81][82]
Trump's Twitter activity significantly increased beginning in 2013; he tweeted more frequently and with more politically charged rhetoric.[83][84]
Twitter was an important tool in Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign, and has been credited as contributing to his victory.[85] Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci recalled that Trump: "felt that there was no separation between his brand and the media, that there was an intersection of value for himself personally between his brand and saturating it in the media".[86] Daniel Pfeiffer, Obama's former strategy communications advisor, commented that Trump is: "way better at the internet than anyone else in the GOP which is partly why he is winning".[87] According to The New York Times, other presidential aides have described Trump "as a sophisticated version of a parrot, given his penchant for repeating information almost unfiltered, as soon as he had processed it."[86]
In 2017, Trump was described as "possibly the first 'social media' and 'reality TV' president" in an article by Van Jones on CNN's website in October 2017. Following Trump's inauguration, he gained control of the official U.S. presidential Twitter account (@POTUS), which had been created by Obama. Trump's first tweets as president were made from his personal account, but he has used both accounts.[88] After Joe Biden won the November 2020 presidential election, Twitter said it planned to hand over the @POTUS account to Biden upon his inauguration on January 20, 2021, which has since happened.[89]
Live-tweeting Fox & Friends
Trump frequently watched the Fox News show Fox & Friends and often tweeted reactions to what he has seen on the show. For example, on January 2, 2018, Trump tweeted that his "Nuclear Button" was "much bigger & more powerful" than Kim Jong-un's, following a Fox News segment about Kim's "nuclear button" minutes before. Trump watches several hours of cable news shows each day, using the "Super TiVo" he had installed at the White House.[90] News organizations have compiled lists of Trump tweets directly repeating what he was watching. The result is that stories that Fox concentrates on become nationally important stories by virtue of the fact that they appear in presidential tweets, setting up a feedback loop.[91] During his first year in office, he mentioned the Fox & Friends Twitter account more than any other account.[92]
Insults
In January 2016, a review by The New York Times found that one in every eight posts by Trump on Twitter "was a personal insult of some kind".[93] From the beginning of his term until May 2019, Trump had insulted 598 people (including private citizens), places, and things on Twitter; targets of insults included politicians, journalists, news outlets, television hosts and programs, former staffers and associates, government agencies, business leaders, books critical of him, the State of California and State of New York, and entire countries.[94] The New York Times published an inventory of all of Trump's Twitter insults from 2015 until January 2021.[95]
Trump often gave opponents nicknames such as "Crooked Hillary"[96] and "Lyin' Ted".[97][98] In 2015, he tweeted against an 18-year-old college student who had challenged him at a New Hampshire political forum, which led to a wave of online harassment against her.[99] In December 2016, as president-elect, he responded to criticism from the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999 in Indiana by tweeting that the local union leader "has done a terrible job representing workers";[100] the union president received threatening phone calls afterward.[101]
International threats
2017–2019 Qatar diplomatic crisis
In 2017, the Qatar diplomatic crisis erupted. An escalation of the Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict, it began when Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt abruptly cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar, alleging that the Qatari government supported terrorists.[102] The severing of relations included withdrawing ambassadors, and imposing trade and travel bans.[103] In a series of tweets, Trump praised the Gulf nations' move against Qatar, took credit for engineering the crisis, and repeatedly criticized Qatar, undermining simultaneous efforts by Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, U.S. Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, all of whom took a neutral stance, called for dialogue and compromise in the interests of regional security, and noted that Qatar hosted the Al Udeid Air Base.[103][104][105][106][107]
Threat to destroy North Korea
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump The