President hails the power of Twitter

LONDON: US President Donald Trump has hailed the power of Twitter to help him fight “fake news” and engage directly with tens of millions of followers.

“I like the immediacy (of Twitter), I like the power of it because it gets the point across,” Trump was quoted as saying by celebrity TV presenter Piers Morgan in an interview to be broadcast by ITV today.

“I can combat that fake news because I have so many followers,” Trump said, according to Morgan’s article for the Daily Mail.

“You add it all up and it’s like over 150 million people – that’s a tremendous amount of people between Facebook and Instagram and Twitter – three different platforms. It’s tremendous.”

Morgan praised Trump as “the most skilled exponent of Twitter in the world”.

Trump replied that he sometimes tweets himself and sometimes asks aides to “put this exact statement out”.

“I’m very exacting – from the comma, to everything,” Trump said.

“But you’re watching and then, like two seconds later, we have ‘breaking news, Donald Trump, President Trump has just been’... And you make a statement and such a powerful statement so quickly.”

Trump rejected a question from US broadcaster CNN during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday.

“I don’t take questions from CNN. CNN is fake news,” Trump said.

He also criticised a question on his upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin from NBC, saying the broadcaster was “possibly worse than CNN”.