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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:12PM (2 children)
Its not really a censorship story or even a politics story.
Look, twitter has no viable business model and has known it for some time.
The solution for the last couple years has been trying to buy into co-opt the legacy dying media. So lots of money has gone into inserting twitter and hashtags as a must-see component of reality TV, etc. Because if your ship is sinking, the best plan is to lash your ship to an even bigger sinking ship (LOL, they must be desperate).
Now legacy dying media is dying at least partially because every survey shows its hyper partisian basically a propaganda outlet for the legacy dying democratic party. So D party membership is over 95% for legacy dying TV news infotainment journalists. Or almost all decision makers at the prime time production studios are D party members to a similar percentage. Those are basically single party industries. I mean there's more democrats working at gun manufacturers than republicans working in journalism or legacy media in general.
The way the far left identifies itself isn't thru going to NRA gun shows like the right or sharing pepe memes on /pol/ or /r/the_donald/ in between the hired shills or listening to "the right stuff radio" podcasts, what the left does is signal their allegiance via the usual shared political bullshit. So twitter doesn't really give a F about Trump any more than my local TV weather girl does, but the cool kids know what to say to fit in, so you end up with meaningless chatter that signifies group allegiance.
This is merely the verbal form of showing the alliance with dying legacy media, in the same way as seeing the hash tag flash on screen during an episode of "Survivor" or some televised sportsball game or similar at some talking-idiot-heads infotainment shows the same alliance.
You gotta hand it to twitter for sticking to an alliance and doubling down. Or... is chaining themselves to sinking ships literally the best business plan they can hope for? Thats kinda dismal but might be true.
I mean, OK, lets say tomorrow the relationship is over and they don't have to submit public oaths of fealty to the legacy media, the love affair is over. Twitters business plan will be to somehow align with or generate revenue from ... who exactly, if not the dying legacy media? If they were not kissing up to the propaganda arm of the democratic party national committee, they would kiss up to ... who? Would they dare to just outright work for and maybe merge with the DNC, that sounds kinda crazy. Maybe accept (foreign) government bribes to promote agendas (as if they don't, maybe that well is being pumped already as fast as it can)?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:43PM (1 child)
I had the same question when Twitter started getting a lot of press, because it was journalists and press junkies pushing it. When Ron Burgundy clones tell you something is a good idea, it's a good bet that it isn't.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 23 2017, @10:34PM
Part of the reason that mainstream media gravitated towards Twitter is that it was a perfect fit for the average journalists' attention span. As in, your typical journalist has the curiosity of a cat and the attention span of a gnat. And this shows up in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that they're easily distracted by any stupid thing that comes their way while missing very important stories going on right out in the open if they ever bothered to look.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.