President Donald Trump is taking on Amazon and the news media once again, writing in a Tweet Saturday morning that The New York Times and The Washington Post will “both be out of business in 7 years!” He also called The Washington Post a “propaganda machine” for Amazon. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, but Amazon has no involvement in the newspaper’s business or editorial operations.
Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace. Will that include the Failing New York Times and propaganda machine for Amazon, the Washington Post, who constantly quote anonymous sources that, in my opinion, don’t exist – They will both be out of business in 7 years!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2018
Amazon and The Washington Post have become a regular target of President Trump. In the past, Trump has accused Amazon of ripping off the U.S. Postal Service (a claim that has been widely disputed) and underpaying taxes. Last summer, GeekWire put together this timeline of President Trump’s attacks against Amazon.
In April, The Washington Post responded to Trump’s repeated attacks with CEO and Publisher Frederick Ryan Jr. telling the newspaper:
Trump appears to view ownership of a newspaper as a way to assert influence. Jeff sees the value of a strong, independent press. Jeff has never proposed a story. Jeff has never intervened in a story. He’s never critiqued a story. He’s not directed or proposed editorials or endorsements. The decisions are made here.
Trump’s latest Tweet appears to come in response to a story in The Washington Post in which the newspaper reported that Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, part of an effort to wipe out fake accounts and the spread of misinformation on the social network.
“I wish Twitter had been more proactive sooner,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.) told The Post. “I’m glad that – after months of focus on this issue – Twitter appears to be cracking down on the use of bots and other fake accounts, though there is still much work to do.”
Last month, Twitter wrote in a blog post about the ways it is dealing with fake and malicious accounts, noting that “inauthentic accounts, spam, and malicious automation disrupt everyone’s experience on Twitter, and we will never be done with our efforts to identify and prevent attempts to manipulate conversations on our platform.”
