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

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?


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:20PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:20PM (#514199)

    Nerd alert:

    I guess you didn't make it far enough in to the books... turns out Zaphod went into the total perspective vortex machine while he was stuck inside a simulation created specifically to trap him. So in the false simulation universe was created for him, thus he was the most important thing. However, if it was reality he would've been just as fucked as the rest of us. He massive ego basically guarantees it would have killed him, or possibly brought him to enlightenment, hard to say with the extremes of any curve.

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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:35PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:35PM (#514220)

    Interesting interpretation. Not sure how you can extrapolate to "...if it was reality..." from DNA's text, given that the whole series is fiction?

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:44PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:44PM (#514277)

      Inside the continuity of the books, he was in an artificial universe specifically created for the purpose of, when he went into the Vortex it wouldn't kill him because he *was* the most important person in *that* universe.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"