Twitter users are showing President Donald Trump less love than they did at the start of his term.
The tweets posted by @realDonaldTrump, the account Trump has used personally, are now notching fewer “likes” now than those from January. Sixty-two percent of Trump’s tweets posted in the first 50 days of his term amassed more than 100,000 likes, according to a Bloomberg analysis. Just 10 percent of his tweets over the following 51 days crossed that threshold.
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Twitter’s “like” function is a form of engagement. Anyone with an account who sees a tweet can choose to activate a heart-shaped button, although it’s not necessarily a proxy for affection. The decline in Trump’s “like” tally is consistent with a broader drop-off in the @realDonaldTrump account’s overall engagements—including retweets, quotes and replies—noted in a recent report by the Associated Press and the design and marketing agency Huge.
What’s driving the downward trend? Several factors could be at play. The president’s approval rating has declined since he took office; enthusiasm for his brand of commentary may be waning; and, of course, newer tweets have simply had less time to accumulate likes, though most likes are usually awarded shortly after a tweet’s publication.
The decline has not affected the president’s ability to use Twitter to deliver his message. Any tweet from @realDonaldTrump is still capable of taking over a news cycle. Trump’s tweet on May 2 calling for “a good ‘shutdown’ in September” had garnered only about 58,000 likes as of Wednesday morning yet had generated stories in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Fox News website, Breitbart, and Bloomberg News.