President Donald Trump continued criticism of Facebook, Google, and Twitter’s effort to weaken conservative and Republican voices on their platforms on Wednesday, citing his personal experience.
“I think they treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly. I could tell you that I have personal experience,” Trump said. “I had a lot of people on the various platforms.”
The president questioned his social media director Dan Scavino about his number of followers who informed him that he had about 160 million across the various social platforms. But Trump indicated that he noticed that some of the numbers were disappearing.
“I can tell you when things are different, all of a sudden you lose people, and you say ‘where did they go?’ they’re taken off,” Trump said.
In June, a recent Twitter purge of accounts lowered Trump’s follower count by hundreds of thousands. Breitbart News also reported that the president’s engagement with his Facebook page had declined by 45 percent after the company tweaked its algorithm.
The president commented on the issue at the White House during an event with reporters and signaled interest in upcoming Congressional hearings scheduled with social media executives.
“I think it’s a very serious problem, because they’re really trying to silence a very large part of this country,” he said. “It’s not right, it’s not fair it may not be legal, but we’ll see. We just want fairness.”
Trump downplayed the suggestion that he was prepared to support regulation of the companies.
“You know what we want? We don’t want regulation, we want fairness,” he said.