Fox News Channel may be President Donald Trump’s favorite media outlet, but POTUS and the channel diverge markedly in their use of Trump’s favorite social-media platform — Twitter — at least in terms of activity level.
For example, the Fox News Channel and Fox News Politics Twitter accounts have issued no new tweets or retweets since Nov. 8, 2018; there have been none from Fox Business since Nov. 9; Fox & Friends, another presidential favorite, hasn’t tweeted since Nov. 12; and The Five hasn’t tweeted since Nov. 23.
Fox would not comment on why the accounts have been silent since then, following hundreds of thousands of tweets, but it appears to be connected with Twitter threats against host Tucker Carlson that date from around the election, particularly after Carlson’s home address was tweeted out and protestors appeared.
Fox News reported at the time that protestors from left-wing militant group Antifa chanted outside of Carlson’s home and posted threats on its website. Carlson was not home, Fox News said, but his wife was, and she locked herself in a pantry and called police. Carlson said the protestors “rang his doorbell, broke his oak door and one protester was apparently caught on security video mentioning a pipe bomb.”
Bloomberg noted those threats in December 2018 and that the Fox News main account had not been used for over a month. Now, more than six months later, that main and the other accounts remain mute.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to tweet regularly — a dozen tweets on June 3, for example — even though he, too, has had issues with the social-media platform.
Trump has accused edge providers, Twitter in particular, of a bias against conservatives. “Things are happening,” he told The Daily Caller in March. “Names are taken off. People aren’t getting through. You’ve heard the same complaints and it seems to be if they’re conservative, if they’re Republicans, if they’re in a certain group, there’s discrimination and big discrimination.”
He even met with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey at the White House in April and, yes, he tweeted about it.
