“Will Twitter be the next Facebook or another
Friendster-style fizzle? While the company doesn’t release user data, Twitter’s
most popular user, President Barack Obama, has 339,500 followers on the site —
a fraction of his 5,767,400 supporters on Facebook (he hasn’t posted since Jan.
19). Still, Internet gurus say the site may be here to stay.”— Adam
Markovitz, “The Truth About Twitter,”
Entertainment Weekly, Mar. 13, 2009
Reading this article, which appeared three years
after the birth of Twitter, is as instructive as it is dismaying nearly a
decade later. Obama’s 5.8 million supporters stood at 101 million after a July
purge by the site slimmed his total by 3 million, while Donald Trump had 53.1
million after the same process.
Astonishing, isn’t it, to think that Obama stayed
off the site for more than a month at
the start of his administration. Would that his successor had shown similar
restraint.
Even in 2009, Entertainment
Weekly vaguely glimpsed that Twitter could be a vehicle for shallow,
unmediated communication between an entertainer and his or her fans. What the
magazine didn’t understand—God, who would?—was that it would become a daily means of
misdirection and mendacity.
In the early 20th century, Theodore
Roosevelt viewed the Presidency as a “bully pulpit”—i.e., a wonderful preaching
position. A little over a century later, a far different Republican—one of the “malefactors
of great wealth” that TR warned against—uses Twitter to “bully” or intimidate
whoever gets in his way.
Not all inventions turn out for the public good…
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