In the wake of last Wednesday’s events at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter went a step beyond attaching warning labels to President Trump’s tweets, and the company locked his account permanently. Trump relied on the platform to bypass traditional media channels, refute fake news, and get his direct views across to hundreds of millions of people. His tweets are still freely available to browse at the Trump Twitter Archive which has monitored his Twitter activity for years.
It shows that he tweeted considerably less during his early days in office and his activity ratcheted up considerably in 2019. The archive shows that Trump tweeted or retweeted approximately 3,500 times in 2018, 7,700 times in 2019, and on over more than 12,000 occasions in 2020. The New York Times reported that he was tagged on Twitter at a rate of 1,000 times a minute that in 2019. His most prolific day came on June 05, 2020, when he sent 200 tweets or retweets, breaking a previous record of 142 sent on during his impeachment trial on January 23, 2020.
Trump tweeted 5.7 times per day on average during his first half-year in the White House and that had grown to 34.8 times a day on average during the second half of 2020. So, with days of his presidency remaining and his megaphone seemingly silenced, where does Trump go from here? He still has the White House press briefing room at his disposal along with his press team. It may well be that Trump will return to the piece of technology that made him a star in the first place – television. If mainstream news organizations follow Twitter’s move and decide against airing the president’s grievances, he may continue to struggle to dictate the national conversation on his own terms without access to his favorite social media platforms.
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