White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway has defended President Donald Trump’s Twitter habits in an interview with The New York Times.
“He needs to tweet like we need to eat,” said Conway.
The New York Times embarked on a study of more than 11,000 tweets by Donald Trump - a President who has used social media like no other - scrutinising the accounts he follows and interviewing administration officials, lawmakers, Twitter executives and ordinary Americans “caught up” in his tweets.
According to the paper’s story, published on 2 November, in more than half of them, Trump used the platform to lambaste someone or something.
Trump has “attacked” at least 630 people and things in 5,889 tweets since taking office, according to the Times.
Other tweets, claims the outlet, referred to “conspiracy theories”, including 40 tweets about voter fraud and a “rigged” electoral system.
Early in Trump’s presidency, top aides discussed asking Twitter to impose a 15-minute delay on his account, similar to the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks, according to the publication.
However, a former White House official is cited as saying they abandoned the idea since the president worried it would make his tweets irrelevant.
Kellyanne Conway’s defence of Donald Trump’s Twitter habits sparked a prompt response from social media users, with some applauding his use of the platform:
Other twitter users took a different stance, pointing out that Trump’s tweeting was a form of “addiction”:
US President Donald Trump has consistently touted his Twitter account’s influence on mainstream media.
Speaking to conservative social media personalities at a White House conference, he said:
“Boom. I press it, and, within two seconds, 'We have breaking news,”' the Times noted.
However, the president’s Twitter habits have also brought attention to the social media platform’s policies, with some accusing Trump of having violated the platform’s rules.
Twitter announced it took “newsworthiness” into account when deciding whether to remove a post that violated its policies.
In September 2017, Trump tweeted that North Korea “won’t be around much longer!” as tensions escalated, sparking fears of a possible military conflict between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
North Korea’s foreign minister responded at the time by saying Trump’s post was a “clear declaration of war”.
Twitter at the time stated it had to hold all accounts, including Trump’s, to the “same rules,” but that “among the considerations is 'newsworthiness' and 'whether a Tweet is of public interest.'”