ObamaGate, The Trend That Wasn’t: Trump Supporters Claim Twitter Censored Them


“Obamagate” is a term that should have been trending this weekend, according to Trump supporters on Twitter.

The current allegations spring from President Trump’s explosive Saturday morning allegations against former President Barack Obama.

President Trump argues that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped during the general election campaign in an attempt to dig up dirt on Trump and his campaign officials.

Trump argues that the then-President Obama found nothing, but committed a Watergate-sized act of “McCarthyism” in making the move.

“Obamagate” sprang from this charge, which itself — as best as anyone in the mainstream media has been able to tell — stems from a report from conservative pundit Mark Levin that was repeated on Breitbart News.

(Steve Bannon, Trump’s White House chief strategist, is a founding member of Breitbart.)

On Sunday morning, Trump called for a special investigation into the alleged wiretapping, and #ObamaGate continued to pepper the Twitter landscape.

This article is now close to 200 words in, and in the short amount of time getting there, 183 new tweets have popped up on the feed using the hashtag.

A single tweet from user EC@SULLIVAN 18 hours ago (on Saturday, March 4), showed a graph as “proof” ObamaGate should have been trending.

In spite of the “evidence,” the ObamaGate tag never showed up in top trending, though #wiretap or #wiretapping were factors throughout the day.

Most of the ObamaGate posts assert that President Obama committed a crime worse than the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign.

Obama has served out his two terms in the White House, so a resignation would not be necessary at this point; but it has not stopped the #ObamaGate users from demanding some form of justice.

Some are merely calling for an investigation into Trump’s charges, while others are paraphrasing the “Lock Her Up” chants that were on frequent displays at Trump’s campaign rallies.

Tweets like this one state outright that President Obama committed a crime and the press is simply covering it up for him.

Another tweet, not shown here out of respect for general audiences but one you can view if you would like at this link, imagines President Obama in jail with the tagline “The New American Dream Reality Show, Orange Is The New Barack.”

In the foreground of the tweet, a panicked Obama is clutching at prison bars while a large inmate examines him in the background.

Hearts float around the inmate’s head in a sign of physical attraction.

Given the nature of some of the tweets, it is possible Twitter may be suppressing the ObamaGate hashtag, which is their right as a privately held company.

It would not be the first time the company has taken action against a conservative property.

The social network has received charges of unfair censorship from conservatives in the past when it permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay conservative commentator often associated with the alt-right movement, for cyberbullying.

Milo attacked comedienne Leslie Jones’ performance in and the overall performance of the Ghostbusters remake.

This spawned a number of racist tweets that the site viewed to be orchestrated by him.

Yiannopoulos argued he should not be held accountable for what others might do in his name.

The ban was never lifted. Milo has since lost a book deal, a keynote speaking engagement, and his job at Breitbart for uncovered remarks he made seeming to condone pedophilia.

Thus far, Twitter has not released a statement as to the charges it is censoring #ObamaGate, but Inquisitr will update when/if they do.

What do you think, readers?

Should ObamaGate be trending at this point, or is the company actively censoring conservatives? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Featured Image by Jack/Flickr Creative Commons/Resized and Cropped/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Share this article: ObamaGate, The Trend That Wasn’t: Trump Supporters Claim Twitter Censored Them
More from Inquisitr