July 11, 2019

Trump Lashes Out at Tech Companies and Lavishes Self-Praise: “So Great Looking and Smart”

Narcissism is a nice way to kick off a social media summit.

Kevin Dietsch/ZUMA

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The White House is set to host its first social media summit where right-wing extremists and trolls will gather on Thursday to allege an anti-conservative bias by the world’s leading tech companies. Notably, Google, Facebook, and Twitter were shut out of attending the event.

But while President Donald Trump declined to directly name them, the three tech giants were clearly on his mind Thursday morning. “A big subject today at the White House Social Media Summit will be the tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination and suppression practiced by certain companies,” he lashed out before launching into a chaotic thread that included more jokes about him serving past two terms, a timely Thursday throwback to his 2016 presidential launch, and another racist attack against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

The tweetstorm concluded with an unabashed moment of self-praise. “So great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” the president called himself.

Thursday’s event comes as the latest in Trump’s longstanding, unsubstantiated claims accusing Silicon Valley of suppressing positive stories about him. As Mother Jones reported, while evidence is lacking in those complaints, more studies suggest that online hate speech—an issue Trump has repeatedly ignored—is on the rise. 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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