Trump says he would delete his Twitter account if it weren’t for ‘fake news’

At an event to sign an executive order that seeks to regulate social media companies, President Trump said he would delete his Twitter account if it weren’t for “fake news.” Trump has been critical of social media companies after Twitter linked to a fact-check page on two of his tweets regarding mail-in voting earlier this week.

Video transcript

- Mr. President, given your concern with Twitter, have you given any consideration to deleting your account and just walking away from this platform you've been so critical of?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, you know, if you weren't fake, I would not even think about it. I would do that in a heartbeat.

- I'm real, sir.

DONALD TRUMP: But the news-- the news is fake. If you look at what gets printed in newspapers-- if only the public could understand where, you know, they're reading a story and they think it's real, and it's not real in so many cases.

And I'm not saying in every case. You have some great journalists. You have some journalists that I have great respect for. But largely I find, at least in a political sense, there's so much fake news it's disgraceful.

I would do that in a heartbeat if I had fair-- if we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat. There's nothing I'd rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account, but I'm able to get to, I guess, 186 million people. When you add up all the different accounts and add Facebook and Instagram, it's a lot of people, and that's more than the media companies have, frankly, by a lot.

And so if I get a story that's wrong, I can put a social media-- I don't usually use the word Twitter. I use-- I say social media. But I put something out, and the next day or the next hour or the next minute everybody's reading about it. So I'm able to refute fake news, and that's very important.