Lots of Meta on Friday, brought on by Mary Trump’s “crazy uncle”.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said he “voted for Ronald Reagan” in this year’s election, writing in the name of the late president and conservative icon after concluding that he could support neither President Trump nor Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Hogan’s latest rejection of his party’s standard-bearer comes as he works to expand his political network nationwide ahead of a possible 2024 presidential bid, with a flurry of fundraisers this month for GOP candidates from Vermont to Nebraska who also cast themselves as pragmatic Republicans.
Many of the candidates Hogan is backing frequently come from centrist enclaves or suburban areas where the governor said he “could help a little bit and show Democrats the kind of Republican they can feel comfortable voting for.”
Meta- in the final weeks of the campaign: Trump cites satirical website to attack Biden and Twitter. He shares content in a way to evade Twitter’s sanctions.
President Trump regularly shares content from his campaign on Twitter without using the common retweet or quote tweet
But instead, he shared a link from the campaign account‘s video, probably by either using the company’s phone app or editing the code used to embed it. That technique is a loophole to a recognizable “retweet” tag most use to share others’ material.
Trump is famous for using his Twitter account as a primary form of communication with the general public. He has made many major announcements on the site to his 87 million followers, including when he announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month. He also uses Twitter to directly communicate with his supporters and boost their calls of encouragement. He often tweets and retweets dozens of times each day.
Trump has tangled with Twitter and Facebook regularly over the past six months as the social media companies increasingly crack down on tweets that violate their policies. In response, Trump has lashed out at the companies for “censoring” him and threatened to try to repeal a law that protects them broadly from liability.
It’s not the first time Trump’s campaign has born the brunt of the crackdown from social media companies.
In August, Twitter locked the campaign’s account until it removed a video in which Trump said children are “almost immune” from the coronavirus. Trump had also posted the video by sharing the campaign’s tweet. His account was left untouched, but after the campaign removed the video, it was also removed from his tweet.
