Trump is 'master' of Twitter and has 'pretty genius' tactics, according to site co-founder

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Twitter co-founder Ev Williams has described Donald Trump’s digital presence as “pretty genius”.

In an interview in Toronto on Tuesday, he told CNN Business the “what Trump has done with Twitter is pretty genius, frankly.”

In May, the president surpassed telling 10,000 lies since taking office in 2017, almost 2,000 of which were posted on Twitter.

His tweets have confounded economic advisors and potential investors since he was elected.

Earlier this week, he tweeted a threat to Iran, writing “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.”

But none of this appears to bother Mr Williams. “He’s a master of the platform like few others,” the former Twitter executive said of the president.

Mr Williams also said that traditional media places too much emphasis on the president’s rocky Twitter presence, echoing a common complaint from Silicon Valley

“The vast majority of the electorate is not on Twitter reading Trump’s tweets and being convinced by that,” Mr Williams said.”What they’re convinced much more by is the destructive power of Fox News, which is much, much more powerful and much more destructive than Twitter.”

Mr Williams now runs Medium, an online host to several long-form accounts, which has been through several iterations since its founding in 2012.

Most recently, a blog post published on the website accusing Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, of sexual assault was found to be fabricated.

“[The blog post] looked a little fishy but it was serious allegations, and we want to not jump to any conclusion,” Mr Williams said.

The post was removed after an investigation by Medium.

“It comes at cost of people trying to game that system and spread false information and abuse it,” Mr Williams told CNN of the ordeal “We have a lot of safeguards against that, and they’re not perfect.”