President Trump on Tuesday accused the country’s leading tech companies — Facebook, Google and Twitter — of being “on the side of the Radical Left Democrats.”
“Facebook, Google and Twitter, not to mention the Corrupt Media, are sooo on the side of the Radical Left Democrats,” the president tweeted. “But fear not, we will win anyway, just like we did before! #MAGA.”
The three companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Hill.
Trump and other top conservatives in recent years have argued that tech companies favor liberals and are biased against conservatives. Firms like Facebook, Google and Twitter have denied that their products or employees are biased against any political ideology.
{mosads}Trump’s tweet comes a day after Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and its former chairman, reportedly sued Twitter and some of its users for more than $250 million. Nunes claimed in the lawsuit that Twitter “shadow-bans” some conservatives, meaning it partially blocks or removes certain content from its platform without the person’s knowledge.
Twitter has denied all shadow-banning allegations from conservatives, saying its algorithm aims to reduce the presence of white supremacists and other extremists and sometimes others accounts get caught up in the removals.
Later on Tuesday, Trump tweeted that he would be looking into a report that his social media director was recently blocked by Facebook.
A Facebook spokesperson told The Hill on Tuesday: “In order to stop automated bots, we cap the amount of identical, repetitive activity coming from one account in a short period of time, such as @mentioning people. These limits can have the unintended consequence of temporarily preventing real people like Dan Scavino from engaging in such activity, but lift in an hour or two, which is what happened in this case.”
“We’ve been in touch with him and have apologized for the inconvenience,” the spokesperson added.
Trump in an interview with Breitbart earlier this week accused Democrats and tech companies of working together in an effort to defeat him in 2016.
“Actually, it’s incredible that I won the election because you know it was so rigged against me,” Trump said. “It wasn’t Russians. Russia collusion was a delusion. But what there is, is there was collusion between the Democrats and these tech companies.”
Trump’s 2020 campaign has spent more than $3.5 million in small, targeted ads on Facebook, and an allied group has spent more than $6 million, making Trump the biggest U.S. political spender since Facebook began tracking ad spending in May 2018.
His 2016 campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, who is now campaign manager for 2020, credited Facebook in 2017 with securing Trump’s path to the White House the previous year.
Updated at 12:34 p.m.