Filed squarely under “uhhh….” is the news that this week the US President will host a social media summit at the White House, which actually won’t feature the two most prominent and well known social networks in existence.
The revelation that Twitter and Facebook aren’t invited comes via CNN Business, citing anonymous sources. Despite Trump’s unstoppable use of Twitter (and exclamation marks), he’s regularly complained that social media is biased against conservatives, even though Trump – and his presidency – likely wouldn’t exist if not for his Twitter presence.
As Gizmodo reports:
“They make it much harder for me to get out the message,” Trump told Fox Business back in June, speaking about Twitter. “These people are all Democrats. It’s totally biased toward Democrats. If I announced tomorrow that I’m going to become a nice liberal Democrat, I would pick up five times more followers.”
President Trump currently has 61.8 million followers on Twitter. It’s not as if he needs five times more followers. 55-odd million bots should be enough for anyone, right?
There’s been no official word from the Trump White House as to which social media companies are actually invited, but the Gizmodo report identifies a number of identities who’ve received invites and published them on their own social media feeds.
Amongst the list are precisely no names that anyone would associate with the phrase “authoritative on social media”, much less any big names in the social media provider landscape. You’d imagine if a social media summit were a real thing, there’d be representatives from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Snapchat or even Google there … but none of those names are mentioned.
As you may note, some of this article is a bit tongue in cheek, but the mind boggles – without social media companies attending, what can this summit hope to achieve?
Probably nothing.
