“It’s a what?” I said in The Denver Post newsroom back when it was in Denver in 2008.
The Democratic National Convention was in town, and this was our test run with the social media platform that would define the next 12 years and dominate so many people’s lives.
We’re going to report stories three sentences at a time for free, I was told.
“That’ll never last,” I thought. It turned out that a lot of Twitter-driven news outlets didn’t last.
Within a few months, I was calling Twitter the place where everybody talks and nobody listens.
With another election in the books, or so they say, it’s time to get ourselves and our democracy in check, if we want the future to be better than the past. We all want that, or so they say.
Tweeting has allowed this president to speak directly to his supporters and punish his enemies to the delight of his base. His tweeting is next-level stuff in both quantity and volume. Nobody does it like Donald Trump.
The day after the election, Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and member of the Blue Dog Caucus, tried to make ”socialist” a dirty word for Democrats, or get clobbered in the next two elections.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who built her political brand online, pivoted and said what winners have that losers don’t is an online brand. AOC reigns supreme with the water-cooler zingers.
Thoughtful politicians will get back to what matters: understanding and reality.
Twitter is a handy way for campaigns on the right and left to keep their candidates under wraps and put out their scripted messages, 280 characters at a time.
CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe said a Biden aide told him the campaign had a strategy since the beginning of the primary.
“They said, ‘It’s very simple,’” O’Keefe reported. “ ‘We turned off Twitter. We stayed away from it. We knew that the country was in a different headspace than social media would suggest.’”
The institutions that lead our nation — the three branches of government and the fourth estate — have utterly failed in holding the powerful to account on truth, fairness and respect for democracy.
Leave it to the unregulated World Wide Web to fill the void.
Enter Parler, a safe space from fact-checkers where anything goes. A week before the election, it had about 4.5 million users. A week after that it had blown up to 9 million, rallying around yet-unproven allegations of voter fraud.
“This platform gets what free speech is all about,” Sen. Ted Cruz said in a video he, well, tweeted in June.
It was the Texas senator’s father who warned in 2016 that a president who doesn’t follow God invites condemnation and destruction. Offended, of course, Trump said he had read (in the National Enquirer) that the senior Cruz aided in the assassination of Kennedy.
The Cruz campaign put out an old-fashioned statement:
“The false, cheap, meaningless comments Trump makes almost daily indicates his desperation to get attention and willingness to say anything to do so. We are campaigning on jobs, freedom and security, while Trump campaigns on false tabloid garbage.”
Quaint.
I was on a panel about political messaging a few years ago. A campaign operative said he had 15 Twitter accounts and encouraged others to do the same, “because it helps if more than one person’s saying it.”
I imagined him feverishly signing in and out of Twitter accounts to like and retweet his own handiwork. I imagined his detail of rag doll soldiers defending him in online spats. I imagined he wore hats to keep them straight.
Some tweeters are addicted to this bombastic word game, but most Americans are tired of it.
A study of social media trends by HootSuite this year indicated that 80% of tweets come from 10% of the users, not counting fake accounts.
I used to compile “Tweets of the Week” culled from the #copolitics hashtag.
Here’s what you learn: A rotation of about six people bicker with each other pointlessly all day long. I imagine how they would act if they met on the street. The pettiness and clutter broke me. The dollar of venom for a dime of accurate information was a bad bargain, except for the purveyors of nonsense. I occasionally sign in now just to see nothing’s changed.
Look, I’m willing to consider the positives. Information should come in many voices from many points of view; Twitter opens the town square to everyone.
If we recover as a nation, though, it won’t be by insulting each other on the computer.
One of the most damning and sad things I’ve read is that Russia didn’t run a disinformation campaign this election, because they didn’t need to; Americans are ready and willing to tear their personal relationships and their country asunder for the privilege of being a know-it-all jerk, one meme at a time.
Whether it’s a compulsion or an addiction, Americans are hooked on lies and likes. Now that the election is over, the time to get clean is now.
Turn off Twitter and call a real friend to tell them you miss them and let them know they matter. That’s real. Fifteen fake profiles are not.
"time" - Google News
November 23, 2020 at 07:00PM
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INSIGHTS | After Trump and #copolitics, it's time to quit Twitter - coloradopolitics.com
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