ALBANY — Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who has two Twitter accounts with more than 863,000 followers — called the popular social media site an “elitist bulletin board” Tuesday and said he doesn’t look at it.
“We created an echo chamber for the elitists to talk to themselves and, this little bubble of an unreal universe that banned political intelligence, believes is representative of the world,” he said in a WAMC radio interview.
“By the way, I don’t look at Twitter.”
Cuomo has two Twitter accounts, one with 853,000 followers and the other with 10,400.
He said during his re-election campaign last year, he was told by reporters to watch Twitter goings-on.
“I said, Twitter is a bizarre universe where you all talk to each other.”
The governor zeroed in on President Trump’s use of the platform to drive the political agenda as one reason for his criticism.
“Instead of having the Democratic Party actually talk about what they would do and their policies and their beliefs and their agenda, they spend a day responding and then cable news goes on and they take the tweet and they’re going to respond to the tweet and he drives the whole dialogue,” Cuomo said.
The exchange was set off when WAMC host Alan Chartock declared “you know people of color often don’t use Twitter. So, are we creating a political messaging system which weeds out people of color?”
But the Pew Research Center found 26 percent of blacks reported using Twitter in 2018, more than the 24 percent of whites and 20 percent of Hispanics.