And the list of losers stretches as far as the eye can see – far longer than even 280 characters. I don’t really regret the loss of many of the careers whose abrupt termination Twitter has made possible, thanks to the oversharing of the Twits themselves. Roseanne Barr, we can hope, is well and truly finished after releasing a tweet that even some of her fans (yes! she had fans!) delicately called “racial.” A hitherto obscure – only 170 Twitter followers – public relations executive named Justine Sacco became internationally famous for posting a “jokey” tweet about AIDS as she embarked on a trip to South Africa. Sacco posted the tweet as her flight took off from London, and by On the other hand, the constraints of the technology and its immediacy ensure that no thought can be fully ventilated, placed in a larger context, and supported with argument and evidence. It’s lose-lose! the time she landed in Cape Town 12 hours later, she and her tasteless tweet stood as the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter worldwide. She had plenty of time to enjoy Cape Town as her (former) employer acceded to the tens of thousands of Twits demanding her firing. And no roll call of Twitter perps and victims would be complete without the name of Anthony Weiner, who tweeted pictures of his... I’m not even going to type the word. (It begins with a “w.”) As punishment, he lost his chance to become mayor of New York. That seems too
kind a fate for him. The 15 months he served in jail are a little more like it. But of course, we are all in one sense victims of Twitter. We can readily see this through the career of one of Twitter’s “winners,” Donald Trump, who arguably owes his victorious presidential campaign in 2016 to the attention-grabbing effects of Twitter and other social media. There are sound reasons why Trump likes Twitter and relies on it so heavily. He’s correct when he says it offers him a direct line of communication with his followers and the general public without having to run the gauntlet of a news media that is obsessively hostile to him. But surely another reason Trump likes Twitter is the same reason why all the other Twits do: It allows instant gratification. By some accounts, including his own, Twitter constitutes the principal form of presidential entertainment not named Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson. He is particularly fond of the counter on the screen that shows him how many people are discussing his tweets... Like the rest of Twitter, the counter runs in real-time. “I used to watch it like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty,” Trump told a White House gathering of his social media allies. “Remember when I said somebody was spying on me? [He was referring to his accusation that President Obama had ordered a wiretap on his phone.] That was like a rocket.” Rocket-like though it may have been, the tweet wasn’t true, and this points up another... uh... weakness of the world that Twitter is creating. Its power to move misinformation is prodigious, far outstripping its power to inform or enlighten. To the untutored and
American Consequences
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