Twitter excluded from Trump meeting with tech leaders over failed emoji deal

The reason behind Twitter's exclusion from a meeting between tech executives and US President-elect Donald Trump stems from its CEO Jack Dorsey's role in rejecting the anti-Clinton emoji during election campaign, a media report said.

Pushing his "America First" agenda, Trump met with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and 12 other technology titans on Wednesday in a bid to heal rifts and get them on board with his programme of creating more jobs and increasing investments in the US. But Twitter was cut out from the meeting.

According to a report in POLITICO, Twitter was told it was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag "CrookedHillary".

"Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee spokesman, was the one who made the call to refuse an invitation to Dorsey or other Twitter executives to Wednesday's meeting," the report said.

However, Trump adviser Spicer later denied the report, telling MSNBC that "the conference table was only so big".

Twitter was one of the few tech companies who were dropped from the Wednesday's meeting, despite the fact that Trump heavily depended on Twitter platform during his election campaign, garnering 17.3 million followers on his account.