Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/16/551274.html
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Seeing Trump have to set up a new account would be hi-friggin’-larious. Maybe he would would to Instagram instead.
“Here’s a photo of the latest dog’s dinner I made out of a policy decision. It is 'uge!”
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Twitter’s brass won’t take him on because they’re scared of him.
I disagree. First, he’s media gold. An attention magnet, sucking in eyeballs from both poles.
Second, if Twitter is afraid of anything, it’s the 38% of people who still approve of Trump’s conduct. Which is a lot in terms of a consumer base.
Third - you can’t shut up a president anyway. It’s not like Twitter can effectively de-platform him and rob him of a way to spread his ideas and messages. As far as they are concerned, the “tweeting” in a broad sense will go on anyway and so it might as well benefit the company.
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I felt this weird sort of sense of obligation wrt social media, like I’d be letting people down if I walked away. So I used Cheap Bots Done Quick to set up a bot that tweets out the sort of things I would probably tweet if I were looking at the site.
I’ve never felt more free.
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I don’t. Twitter has only proven that most people who use it are twits.
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I thought it was gold, but it was bronze.
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They have an easy solution to this, put out a press release stating something like:
“Due to the nature of Mr. Trump’s official status, Twitter cannot verify and maintain presidential records for the federal government and be a private company. As no American is ever sure if Trump is simply texting on the toilet, releasing an official statement, or allowing random staff access to his account, his account will be suspended unless all tweets are followed by a statement indicating it is an official statement by Trump and subject to Congressionally-mandated preservation.”
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Totally. They’re not scared of him - they’re profiting from him. So much so, that they feature him in their advertising in other countries.
I walked away from Twitter last week. I can’t take the constant barrage of fake outrage and the lack of controlling what I see in my feed now that I see Likes from people I follow. They don’t want that shit showing up in their feeds, or they’d retweet it. That’s what retweets are for.
I can’t even turn off others’ Likes like I can with their Retweets in the official client.
To use the only words people seem to react to anymore, total disaster! Sad!
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Already find twitter worthless for anything other than snark, jokes, and alerts to more news. It is impossible to have a deep thought well explained on there.
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As others pointed out, Trumps isn’t a bug, its a feature. I bet they have graphs showing Twitter use jump with each Presidential tweet and they get little chubbys.
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My thoughts exactly. Twitter is the only social network I’ve ever consistently used. It started as a way to keep up with friends from other cities, then as a great way to keep up to date with developing news. Ultimately, it became pretty engaging. Now though, it’s a convoluted nightmare.
You know what I want to see? The tweets an retweets of the people I follow, in chronological order. I don’t want to see any of the other shit Twitter inserts into my timeline. I don’t care about it. Otherwise, I’d be following it myself.
The biggest problem I have is the groupthink. I think about 80% of it is bots or sockpuppets (actually, I wonder how much of Twitter’s total traffic can be attributed to bots and sockpuppets), but the real people start to pile on. It’s become such a divisive, reactionary environment that it makes me anxious to even go on anymore.
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Methinks if people stopped thinking like that, we could finally be rid of it. Sure, I like 140-character one-liners, but those can be just as easily served up by Imgur or some Tumblr aggregator.
'Course, then we wouldn’t be able to make the “haha twits” joke anymore.
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Same thing. Trump’s power comes from the trollies who made him.
These aren’t mutually exclusive things.
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Yes, it’s amazing how many eyeballs a 24-hour-a-day trumpathon will bring to a website.
Donald Trump gets his message amplified for free by friends and enemies alike. It was a critical factor in his takeover of the Republican nomination and eventual election.
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For one blissful moment I thought the headline meant that Twitter was finally closing.
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The more we talk about the Important Principles And Issues Involved, the further we get from a world that any decent person should want to live in. Twitter is not a treasured civic institution won with the blood of brave revolutionaries. It’s a dumb fucking chat app created to make money for a couple of mediocre bros, and if it disappeared tomorrow, the damage to society would be: nothing.
If you make some dumb app and it takes off, that’s great. Ride that train as far as it’ll take you. But if your dumb little app becomes history’s greatest mouthpiece for hate-mongering misogynist anti-intellectual arson, don’t suddenly pretend you’re Joan of Arc borne on the motherfucking wings of Destiny. You’re Leni Riefenstahl without the talent, dignity or principles.
Millions of people are desperate to find anything they can actually do about the nightmare timeline. A handful of people at Twitter, uniquely, could do quite a lot, but they choose not to. Whether they’re scared, or delusional, or just hoping to squeeze a couple more undeserved lottery wins’ worth of cash out of the whole thing, it doesn’t matter. They’ve personally let down humanity on a scale that might well be unprecedented in history and Hell is their certain destination.
(Yes, if they deleted Turmp’s account now, it would be too late. But it’s only getting tooer later)
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The only thing that I’ve ever found Twitter useful for is to sign into other things. Otherwise, never understood why people like or even use the damn thing.
Belgian pop star sensation Stromae offers some strong opinions on it:
(Definitely check out his other stuff; I don’t even speak French and it’s fantastic)
Don’t worry, everyone, they are fixing it!
I can’t wait to hear the earnest case for why silencing Nazis must never mean silencing Hitler
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Don’t you know,
they’re talkin’ bout a revolution?
But it sounds like a whisper…
