Did Dan Scavino just reveal that he writes Trump's tweets?

A tweet appeared on both Trump's account and that his social media director at the same time

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published October 5, 2017 11:50AM (EDT)

 (Twitter/realDonaldTrump)
(Twitter/realDonaldTrump)

President Donald Trump's social media director may have inadvertently revealed he is responsible for at least some of the commander in chief's tweets yesterday.

Two tweets containing the exact same wording appeared on both Trump's personal account and that operated by Scavino appeared at the same time. One possible explanation for this is that the tweet's author — whomever it may be — used TweetDeck, a tool that allows Twitter users to post a single tweet to more than one account simultaneously, according to ABC News.

Study the two below.

While Scavino's tweet has since been taken down, Trump's remains up on his account.

Scavino, of course, felt the need to chime in on the controversy — through his Twitter account.

This isn't the first time that Twitter watchers have suspected that the president doesn't write all of his own tweets. Last year, an article offering a statistical analysis of Trump's tweets — which at that time came from either a Samsung Galaxy phone or an iPhone — appeared in The Washington Post. As author David Robinson argued:

The data clearly shows that the Android and iPhone tweets are from different people, posting at different times of the day, and using hashtags, links and retweets in distinct ways. What’s more, the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be benign announcements and pictures. This survey looks at 628 iPhone tweets and 762 Android tweets.

Interestingly, the latest Trump/Scavino tweet actually breaks from the pattern that Robinson identified. It is a much angrier and more negative tweet than those usually attributed to Trump's staff.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Dan Scavino Jr. Donald Trump Donald Trump Twitter News Politics President Donald Trump Social Media