Fra Zerohedge:
Twitter users are showing President Trump less love than they did at the start of his term.
(click image for large interactive version)
What’s driving the downward trend? Bloomberg notes several factors could be at play. The president’s approval rating has declined since he took office; enthusiasm for his brand of commentary may be waning; and, of course, newer tweets have simply had less time to accumulate likes, though most likes are usually awarded shortly after a tweet’s publication.
Trump says he prefers Twitter because he wants to work around the mainstream media’s filter.
“When the media takes my message, knows what my message is and then writes it purposely so it doesn’t sound good, I’d rather do Twitter,” he said a few days after taking office.
But, as AP reports, Twitter appears to have its own partisan filter. Reaction to Trump’s tweets break down sharply along partisan lines, with conservatives more likely to retweet without commentary while liberals are for more likely to respond to a tweet and, presumably, disagree. About 96 percent of those who simply retweet the president’s words are right-leaning, according to the analysis, while about 54 percent of his replies come from left-leaning users. Verified accounts — often journalists, celebrities, politicians or other public figures — are 70% more likely to weigh in on Trump’s tweets by quoting them, interjecting their own voices to the discussion.
However, as Bloomberg reports, the decline has not affected the president’s ability to use Twitter to deliver his message. Any tweet from @realDonaldTrump is still capable of taking over a news cycle. Trump’s tweet on May 2 calling for “a good ‘shutdown’ in September” had garnered only about 58,000 likes as of Wednesday morning yet had generated stories in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Fox News website, Breitbart, and Bloomberg News.
