Donald Trump may have axed Twitter from tech meet over "Crooked Hillary" emoji

Republican President-elect Donald Trump snubbed social media giant Twitter because the company refused to create a "Crooked Hillary" emoji mocking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Politico reported citing an anonymous source on Wednesday.

Trump's highly publicized Wednesday meeting with a bevy of tech industry leaders was conspicuously absent of representatives from Twitter, one of the real estate mogul's prized communications tools. Company CEO Jack Dorsey was not among those present at the meeting, which included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

According to the New York Times, Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer explained Twitter's absence was because "the conference table was only so big, OK?"

But while Spicer remained deliberately vague, the underlying feud is very public. Trump campaign digital advertising and fundraising director Gary Coby wrote a fuming Medium post in November detailing Dorsey's alleged intervention against a #CrookedHillary emoji. According to Coby, the $5 million promotional deal the Trump campaign signed with Twitter allowed them to propose their own emoji, but the company balked when they chose an anti-Clinton slogan.

According to Politico's anonymous source, Spicer was the one who cut Twitter out of the meeting.

Another possible reason for the flap noted by Politico is that Twitter was the only out of nine major tech companies asked by the Intercept to explicitly say they would not work on Trump's proposal to bring back a national registry of Muslim immigrants.

While Trump and his staff have at times proposed the president-elect would tone down his famously hostile presence on the website, the frequency of Twitter-based Trump scandals has not slowed since the Nov. 8 presidential elections. In addition to spreading outright lies on the site claiming "millions" of people fraudulently voted for Clinton, Trump has taken to Twitter to rebuke comedy series Saturday Night Live for parodying him, repeatedly taunt members of the media and propose far-right former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage for ambassador to the U.S.

In the midst of other controversies, such as a phone call with the Taiwanese president which could jeopardize U.S.-China relations, Trump has grown fond of tweeting his own side of events.