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Twitter Co-founder: I’m Sorry if We Made Trump’s Presidency Possible

posted by martyb on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the closing-the-barn-door dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

If anyone knows how important Twitter is to Donald Trump, it's the president.

“Without the tweets, I wouldn't be here,” he told the Financial Times last month.

To which Twitter's co-founder says: Sorry about that, world.

Evan Williams, who still sits on the company's board of directors, recently told The New York Times that he wants to repair the damage he thinks Twitter and the broader Internet have wrought on society in the form of trolls, cyberbullies, live-streamed violence, fake news and — yes — Trump.

“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Williams told the Times. “I was wrong about that.”

“If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry,” he said.

Is Twitter responsible?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (#514182) Journal

    Maybe it's time to stop giving huge amounts of VC funding to kids. Kids don't have any sense of proportion...

    There's a reason Tweeter didn't appear in Europe - they invented a tool better suited to the purpose of terse communication, namely IRC [wikipedia.org]

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:46PM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:46PM (#514779) Homepage
    When people ask me how I keep up to date with what my friends are doing, I always answer "the same way I have been since 1993", referring of course to IRC. Right now, I'm on a server that hosts a channel full of ex workmates, another server that hosts several channels full of beer-drinking buddies in the countries I visit most often, and of course on the soylent IRC server. Occasionally I hang around on a much wider range of technical channels (whenever I receive offers of help on #devuan after a question, I hang around until I can offer as much help to someone else, for example).

    Oh, noes, my xterm (running under tmux over ssh on my home server) is unable to display a black-face pile of poo, what a disaster! (I presume such clipart is specifiable, as the colour modifiers are now standardised, and as pile of poo has a face, he should have a specifiable face colour. (Don't give me "but it's not a person" - neither is the vampire clipart, and you can specify Blackula if you so desire. https://emojipedia.org/vampire-dark-skin-tone/ )

    It was my pleasure many years later to work with Jarkko Oikarinen not once, but twice (once he was a customer I was supporting on-site, and once as a near-team-mate when I worked for that client). He was always very modest about what he'd created, it was just a thing that he did in the past, and had nearly forgotten about it. To me, it's a important part of my interactions with most other human beings I interact with.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves