Bullshit. You don’t “need” to be on anything. If you have something to sell, say or market you will find a way. You are right. If you are good enough you and your company, book, TV show, etc. will survive. Find a way. Be adventurous.
I saw hundreds of Tweets listing phone numbers to call. Millions of people saw and retweeted messages about who to call and how to join phone banks. Word spread among social media to give people the tools to contact their reps to complain. Twitter most definitely helped mobilize and inform people. That’s what it does well, for better or worse.
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Dear Leader tRump needs his twit fix daily or he’ll start WWIII !
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I can’t think of a single communications tool - hell, I’m having a hard time thinking of any tool at all - that can’t be used effectively both by people I like, and people I loathe.
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I hear from some very smart people, very smart, that The Government is thinking about taking them over to act as an official source of news and information. You heard it here first (for the last time).
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And where do you think the news was spread from? Twitter is breaking news right now, it’s why competing with complete bunk is hard for corporate media.
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I think that you are in the right here. I saw the thing on catertubes news about the ethics committee and thought that it was done already (I don’t tweet)(and I live in the deep blue).
Caller ID?
Contraception?
I wish it was a large ball of fire. But probably reduced usage until it is no longer a thing, and gets sold off to yahoo for something.
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I’d love to see Lindy West out front on this. I’ve some fondness for her message(s).
There certainly are others on the same boat as she is. Perhaps a broadside can be mounted to bring this about (tiny pun).
Speaking of tiny. On Drumpfs attraction to Twitter. Perhaps it’s really a fondness for the tiny keyboards on phone interfaces that attracts him to the format.
If Twitter shuts down Trump will just switch to some other form of social media.
But as long as there is a twitter and a trump there will be @freeyourmindkid providing your daily dose of schadenfreude.
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All of them ALLOW this. Hell all of the people on Twitter could join the BB BBS tomorrow and start posting. Twitter is unique in that some how everyone decided to go on there.
Though your last statement is off - they don’t communicate WITH people, as much as AT people. I have repeatedly said it is horrible of anything other than short announcements, breaking news, and jokes or quips. Oh and snark and hate.
And good, right? Do we want just echo chambers? Lots of forums for just that. Oh, you don’t like public forums with people spouting opinions you don’t like? Gee, isn’t that, like, real life? How the hell can you expect people to physically live together if they can’t even deal with each other in cyberspace?
Nastiness for sure is worse online than in real life, but we have to deal with everyone. Some forums like 4chan thrive on nastiness. BB is remarkably free of it. Most forums are somewhere in the middle. If twitter wants people to be more polite, then they will have to make some hard harassment rules and enforce them. At the same time no system will be perfect.
There are people on there just to be dicks. In a small forum such as BB, those people get banned, and with BB being rather small and uninteresting (on the grand scale) they move on. Twitter is the big leagues. Thousands, maybe even millions of people to watch you being a dick. You get banned, you just make a new account. Because even if 99% of the people are being relatively cool, the 1% doing it for the LOLs can ruin it for everyone. So maybe small niche communities work better in that respect.
Maybe there should be a system where new twitter accounts posting or replying to others are ghosted unless approved. And only start showing up normally until you get a few hundred under your belt. People on there just to trolley never get seen because their posts are never approved and their accounts never default to show. They would have to invest a lot of time writing normal tweets so can finally have that their racist tirade that gets them banned.
Twitter gave Trump the ability to dominate the news cycle even in the middle of the night, since he could tweet whatever nonsense he wanted at any time and the press ate it up. Sure, some of that blame goes to the press, but without Twitter he would have found it much harder to do.
Mind experiment: imagine if all social media suddenly ceased to exist. I think the anonymity of certain types of social media allows people to be jerks, and express opinions that would get them shunned in daily life face-to-face with other people. Very few would go to someone’s house and scream epithets at them, but with Twitter you can do that on your phone while waiting for a bus, and nobody will even know it’s you.
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Is there anything more deserving of a roundhouse kick to the face than someone from Twitter mourning the way they enabled Turmp? They could have just deleted his account. They could have deleted his account and said “something with serious and troublingly Nazi-like consequences is happening on our still-very-new platform, so in the name of basic caution we’re going to pull the plug on that, but we wish Turmp luck with his campaign”.
The media’s weird navel-gazing fixation on Twitter means they feel obliged to report every hideous insane thing he says on there (since they know their competitors saw it too), even though if he said the exact same stuff via a torrent of normal press releases, they’d have zero problem ignoring it. Yes, that’s a problem with the rest of the media, and yes, it’s a problem that so many people voted for such a sack of shit regardless, and yes, obviously, Turmp himself is a problem. Perhaps we’d still be in the darkest timeline if Twitter had resisted. Who knows. The way it actually happened, Twitter was at the epicenter, and they very much chose to be there.
PS:
If you take a graph sloping downwards and turn it upside down, you get… a graph sloping downwards.
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it means very little – even as an info graphic – unless they show that the one day change was somehow unusual. all they show is that it changed. take any other day, and the stock will also have changed.
reporters know that the soon to be disaster-in-chief is click-bait heaven, so everything that could theoretically be ascribed to him will be, even if the connection is tenuous at best.
you know, i had to flip my laptop upside down just to prove that… in fact you are correct. also, interestingly enough, trump’s tweets make much more sense in this direction. but typing is much more difficult.
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Well Twitter, you could start by kicking Trump the fuck off, and keep him off.
The medium is the message, remember?
The entire internet is a vessel for alt-right trolls…
