President-elect Donald Trump should be stopped from issuing personal attacks on Twitter, The Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington has said.

Huffington, who was formerly editor-in-chief of the US news site, dubbed the Republican businessman the “poster child of sleep deprivation” during a CNBC Q&A with Tania Bryer at the World Economic Forum 2017.

The President-elect’s frequently controversial tweets are regularly littered with capital letters – social media style for shouting.

 Donald Trump
President-elect Donald Trump (Jane Barlow/PA)

Trump, who has nearly 20 million followers on Twitter, revealed on Monday that he would continue to tweet from his personal account when he took office because he was “covered so dishonestly by the press”.

Earlier this month, he tweeted that Meryl Streep was “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” after she took aim at him during the Golden Globes.

Huffington said Trump “should be separated from his phone at night, get a good night’s sleep and stop tweeting in the middle of the night”.

Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington (Jonathan Brady/PA)

She said: “It’s affecting him in the sense that, even after he won, he was basically taking the bait, constantly. You would have thought after you win, you can just relax, you’re on top of the world, you’re going to be President of the United States in a few days.

“Every little thing, kind of, makes him upset. And I promise you, if he got eight hours sleep, and did not tweet in the middle of the night, the next four years would be infinitely better for the world.

“So I highly recommend that his advisers take the phone away.”

Donald Trump
President-elect Donald Trump (Paco Anselmi/PA)

Asked about news website BuzzFeed’s decision to publish an explosive dossier containing allegations that Russia holds compromising information on Trump, Huffington said she would not have taken the same decision at The Huffington Post.

She said: “Absolutely not. Because nobody has been able to verify it. That’s why CNN did not publish it, that’s why the New York Times did not publish it.”

“Because otherwise, the media are going to lose their credibility when there are real stories they want to address, and they want to criticise the administration on.”

 Donald Trump
President-elect Donald Trump (Jane Barlow/PA)

“And so it’s incredibly important that we don’t fall into the trap of publishing unverifiable stories because they confirm a preconceived position we have.

“Otherwise we fall into the trap that happened during the Obama years, when the right-wing press would publish anything against Obama.”