Donald Trump Jr. has said he believes he was once being silenced by Twitter because one of his posts only got a handful of retweets on the platform.
The president’s son told CNBC’s Sara Eisen on Wednesday that he noticed a huge change in what he dubbed “Twitter 1.0″ around 2016 when he woke one morning to discover a post of his had only garnered a mere 5 retweets.
“[People would ask me] ‘How do you know they’re manipulating the algorithm?’” he said, recalling those terrifying years. “’Because yesterday, I was getting 5,000 retweets a post. Today, I got 5. Single-digit. 5. Something changed!’”
“Maybe it was a bad post?” suggested Eisen.
“I can tell when it’s a bad post,” Don Jr. fired back. “Sometimes I hit that send button, I know it’s a banger.“
The 47-year-old then accused Twitter of colluding with the government to censor conservative posts on the platform.
“It was happening at a level that was truly disgusting. When the government was getting involved and preventing [conservative posts from spreading].”
The president’s oldest son appears to be mixing up two separate controversies that happened years apart. In 2018, there was a glitch that effected Twitter in which prominent conservative voices weren’t being pushed in the algorithm. After a few days of conservative hubbub on the platform, which included a tweet from President Donald Trump, the glitch was fixed. The government, which was headed by Donald Trump at the time, was not involved in stifling conservative voices on the platform.
The conservative complaint about the government interfering with Twitter sounds like the “Twitter Files” controversy, a much-hyped but ultimately underwhelming conspiracy that suggested the government directed Twitter to downplay posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop. This occurred during the Joe Biden administration, years after Don Jr.’s post numbers bounced back to more consistent levels.
The segment came as Don Jr. raved about Elon Musk’s more conservative-friendly rebrand of Twitter as “X.”
He called Musk one of the “great minds of civilization, certainly of the last century” and gushed over the billionaire’s “commitment to free speech.” He claimed the rebrand to X “changed the outcome of elections” because people were “finally able to see alternative viewpoints.”
Under self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Musk, X has capriciously suspended left wing journalists, sued left wing media advocacy groups, the Anti-Defamation League, and advertisers who left the platform because it started promoting far-right extremist content, and lost its CEO because the platform’s chatbot, Grok, praised Adolf Hitler.
That being said, Don Jr.’s posts are back to getting between 1,000-5,000 RTs each.
The post Don Jr. Suggests Wild Conspiracy Behind His Lack of Retweets appeared first on The Daily Beast.
