The mystery of Trump's Twitter mentions and where he finds those awful retweets
Donald Trump loves to tweet, this much is known. But he also has a thing for occasionally retweeting random users and that's when he gets into hot water.
On Wednesday, Trump faced wide, global condemnation for retweeting anti-Muslim propaganda from the deputy leader of one of Britain's most extreme far-right groups, Britain First.
It was just the latest example of Trump retweeting inflammatory content. He's also been criticized for retweeting a Mussolini quote, a Neo-Nazi named "White Genocide, and the infamous figure behind the "Pizzagate" conspiracy.
But where does he get it?
To give you an idea of what Trump sees at any random moment of a normal work day (whatever that may be under his administration), here's a 10-second clip of tweets simply mentioning his Twitter handle, "@realdonaldtrump."
This clip was taken around 11:45 a.m. ET on Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017, about an hour after his most recent tweet. It's like a Vegas slot machine. How he can pull out any random mention is beyond comprehension.
And that's not even direct replies to his incendiary tweets. The number of replies can cover a wide range, depending on the subject matter, but they always number in the thousands.
As of the time that GIF above was grabbed, a Trump tweet with a video of his visit to Missouri to speak about his tax reform bill had around 8,200 replies. But his initial tweet referring to the firing of Matt Lauer had accumulated over 59,000 replies.
Either, really, is an overwhelming number and he gets all kinds of responses in general, from positive to negative to bizarre spamming. Even filtering for just verified accounts -- and Twitter has had its share of issues with those -- still leaves too many replies to easily navigate.
It's a wonder he can find anything worth sharing in this mess. And yet, he does.
A story this week from Politico relates White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's ongoing trouble with keeping Trump off Twitter and sharing these terrible things he finds.
Twitter has allowed the president to continue accessing fringe websites and viewing racist videos simply by scanning his “mentions,” according to two former aides who have observed how he uses the site. Trump doesn’t use the direct-message function on the website, which would allow people he follows to privately share links with him — but he often looks at tweets that mention his handle, and picks up links and videos there.
The conversation on Twitter then often dictates his thinking. “Everybody’s talking about this,” he will tell his top aides in the West Wing, referring to a clip or an article he saw circulating among the small group of Twitter users he follows.
Trump only follows 45 people -- mostly family, staffers, and Fox News pundits -- and we get a good sense of what he sees in his timeline thanks to the Trump's Feed Twitter account. Politico suggests Trump may have seen one of the Britain First videos via Ann Coulter, who Trump follows. Her Twitter feed shows she shared the video — but after Trump did. So if Trump did find the video on Coulter’s feed, she must have hit "undo retweet."
It could also be random chance which actually makes a chaotic kind of sense. Twitter's mobile app, which Trump uses to tweet, doesn't constantly stream replies like Tweetdeck; instead, you have to refresh your mentions to see new ones. So it could all be about what Trump sees whenever he just happens to scan his mentions at any given moment.
Of course, regardless of how he finds these awful things, these random needles in an infinitely large haystacks, it's worrisome that he still chooses to share them. Whether it's by happenstance or shared by Coulter, Trump still feels it's okay to share these things from, for better or worse, what he's made into a powerful platform.
And as long as he's allowed to use that platform to spread hateful -- if not downright false -- content, people will continue to take advantage of his habits and use his retweets to propagate their own dangerous beliefs.
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
