If you follow business news, you know this is the year of Twitter. It might be its last. Thanks to Donald Trump and his millions of Twitter followers, this has been a banner year. And thanks to Donald Trump this might be the year of Twitter’s disgrace.
Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey explained on Twitter’s tenth anniversary earlier this year that Twitter allows people to see what is happening in the world. They can see what is happening about any event.
Twitter is what keeps Donald Trump awake nights twitting rants about his opponents (in both political parties). There is no fact check on Twitter and he can lie, defame and corrupt his gullible followers as he wishes. He relishes in dispensing falsehoods to polish his ego. He denies his transgressions.
There is little need for truth on Twitter. There is no room for proof.
And Twitter barely needs content. CEO Jack Dorsey is very proud of one English Twitter user who set his camera to see a puddle outside his window. The puddle ended up with some 650,000 viewers. We wonder how many advertisers are interested in people who would think a puddle is interesting?
But Trump seems to have many millions of followers on Twitter. You wonder when these people have last taken the trouble to read a real newspaper? Is he only pandering to the ignorant? What does that say about Twitter?
Hillary Clinton said something early on in the campaign relevant to the lack of social graces of some of Donald Trump’s followers. That was a no-no. Politicians know better than to malign their opponent’s supporters. You are trying to win them over, not make them mad at you.
Mind you, that has never held Donald Trump back. Nobody ever accused him of being a real politician. He has been a sham and a bad smell in the political field for more than a year.
It is amazing throughout the United States that academics are only now starting to compare Trump’s actions to incidents in the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. While Adolph Hitler was far more circumspect than Donald Trump, the Trump big lie approach to politics is straight out of the book as though written by Reich Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels.
Our only advice to the people pushing Twitter is they better exercise some control over their domain on November 9. There must be laws in the United States that make inciting to riot or insurrection a criminal offence.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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