Twitter Wars
In 2008, as I was heading to Denver and Minneapolis to cover the national political conventions, one of the tech whizzes at the newspaper tried to persuade me to open an account on something called Twitter.
“What’s Twitter?” I asked stupidly.
“It’s for people who don’t have time to write long pieces,” she said. “We want you to Tweet all day during the conventions.”
Yeah, like I wouldn’t have enough to do. I rolled my eyes and ignored her.
By February of the next year I saw the value in a platform that allowed you to churn out pithy 140 character snippets. Once I got the knack of it I liked it.
Still do.
Twitter lets you curate your news feed to keep an eye on the ramblings of people with whom you agree, disagree or simply find amusing.
It’s awash in bile, bullying and world-class weirdness, too. It can be a steaming cesspool or a place to connect with like-minded people swapping everything from child-rearing tips to valuable details on the latest clinical trials for cancer.
Twitter has no obligation to give a platform to me or anyone else. It’s not run by the government and First Amendment rights don’t apply. Twitter suspends or terminates many accounts that violate their rules of conduct. For the most part, though, Twitter is an unruly place. It’s the Wild West of the digital communications.
The president is a notorious Tweeter. Some of his communiques are insightful, many are petty or frivolous.
Why does he Tweet? Trump believes - and he’s right - that the mainstream media loathes him. So instead of allowing his messages to percolate through his enemies, Trump uses Twitter to speak directly with the public. No filter.
During a Democratic debate last October, Kamala Harris demanded that Trump’s Twitter account be taken down. She attempted to goad Elizabeth Warren to join her on this fool’s errand, but Warren wisely demurred.
Now MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinksi has taken up the cause.
She and husband Joe Scarborough were once pals of the president, but they’ve been trading increasingly nasty barbs with him for the past four years. The couple ruthlessly attacks the president on their morning TV show and Trump responds in kind on Twitter.
Mika is incensed by recent Trump Tweets urging Florida law enforcement to reopen an investigation into the death of a Scarborough intern in one of his offices when he was a member of Congress.
On Wednesday Mika spent most of the day badgering Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, demanding that Trump be banished.
By late afternoon she announced - via Twitter, of course - that Dorsey had agreed to speak with her.
Will she be able to convince a guy worth $4.6 billion that he ought to dump the leader of the Free World from his platform? We’ll see. It’s worth noting that the president has 80 million followers. Twitter may have 330 million users but it’s estimated that only 145 million are regular users.
If Trump is booted from Twitter, there could be an exodus as the president moves to an alternative social media platform and his fans follow him.
Someone should remind Mika that Twitter has a block function. With one click, you can make your nemesis disappear. You can‘t see what they Tweet. They can’t see you.
But Mika and her band of angry anti-Trumpers don’t simply want to stop seeing Trump’s Tweets. They don’t want YOU to see them.
There’s a word for that: Censorship.
An odd thing for a member of the media to push.
