President Donald Trump’s presence on Twitter receives almost countless mentions in the media. Imagine what that’s done to Twitter’s notoriety.
The social media platform Twitter has gone up in market value significantly since Trump’s election in 2016, according to Forbes. CEO Jack Dorsey’s net worth has skyrocketed from $1.3 billion to $4.4 billion in the past four years, tripling in size. The New York Times estimated that Trump has sent out at least 11,000 tweets since his presidential inauguration. A Gallup poll from 2018 found that 76 percent of Americans saw, read, or heard about his tweets on a regular basis.
Yet Twitter and its employees have shown themselves to be consistently liberal. A glance at the political donations made in the last year exhibits staunch Democrat leanings, with no donations made to the right at all.
According to OpenSecrets.org, a project of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Twitter employees gave $109,456 to politicians for the 2020 cycle. The No. 1 recipient for donations was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who is also running for the Democratic nomination for president. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) received the second-highest number of donations. In third place was Sen. Bernie Sanders. But nowhere on the list were Republicans.
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In 2018, Dorsey admitted that the culture at Twitter was so tilted in one direction that conservatives didn’t feel safe expressing their opinions in the workplace. “To be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” he told Jay Rosen at Recode. Later on, Dorsey decided that the scales had permanently tilted in one direction, telling podcast host Sam Harris, “I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore. I don’t believe that we should optimize for neutrality.”
But providing a platform where originally conservatives and liberals were able to share their opinions in the open gave Dorsey an edge over most CEOs. Forbes estimated that since Trump’s election, his net worth rose by 240 percent, more than most billionaires in the past four years. That apparently has not made Dorsey happy, since he apparently is moving to Africa for at least half of 2020.
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