Trump's Tweets

[southernhybrid]

This morning there were several articles in the NYTimes regarding the history and influence of Trump's Tweets. The Times did an in-depth study on the Tweets. Trump and his people were asked if they wanted to comment for the articles, but they didn't reply.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/02/us/politics/trump-twitter-disinformation.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

The above link is from a very lengthy article so I will quote quite a bit in case some of you are unable to access it.

In September, an obscure Twitter account promoting a fringe belief about an anti-Trump cabal within the government tweeted out a hashtag: #FakeWhistleblower.

It was typical for the anonymous account, which traffics in far-right content and a conspiracy theory known as QAnon, some of whose adherents think that satanic pedophiles control the “deep state.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently labeled QAnon a potential domestic terror threat.

Still, that did not stop others, including a Republican congressional candidate, from quickly picking up the hashtag and tweeting it. Within a week, hundreds of QAnon believers and “MAGA” activists had joined in, posting memes and bogus reports to undermine the complaint by a government whistle-blower that President Trump had pressed Ukraine’s leader for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.

Then Mr. Trump tweeted the hashtag himself.

To assess this unprecedented moment, The New York Times examined Mr. Trump’s interactions with Twitter since he took office, reviewing each of his more than 11,000 tweets and the hundreds of accounts he has retweeted, tracking the ways he is exposed to information and replicating what he is likely to see on the platform. The result, including new data analysis and previously unreported details, offers the most comprehensive view yet of a virtual world in which the president spends significant time mingling with extremists, impostors and spies.

Mr. Trump even retweeted a phony Russian account that said, “We love you, Mr. President!”

In fact, Mr. Trump has retweeted at least 145 unverified accounts that have pushed conspiracy or fringe content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended by Twitter. Tinfoil-hat types and racists celebrate when Mr. Trump shares something they promote. After he tweeted his support for white farmers in South Africa, replies included “DONALD IS KING!” and “No black man can develop land.”

QAnon-related accounts have potentially migrated to the president’s iPhone courtesy of retweets by Donald Trump Jr., the Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo and the conservative commentator Eric Bolling, all of whom Mr. Trump follows. The younger Mr. Trump has also retweeted Russian intelligence operatives pushing divisive stories about immigration and voter fraud.

The path to #FakeWhistleblower stretches back to a seminal conspiracy theory in Trump World: #FakeBirthCertificate.

Mr. Trump’s campaign to sow doubts about Mr. Obama’s birthplace, as he was considering running for president himself in 2012, showcased his talent for propagating a useful lie. It also overlapped with his growing presence on Twitter.

When his account was created in 2009, the three-year-old platform was just beginning to extend its reach beyond a community of journalists, techies and other early adopters. Over time, as high-profile public figures joined and Twitter allowed for longer messages, its influence grew as a forum for people to comment in real time about live events, world leaders to make official pronouncements and celebrities to interact with fans. Twitter said earlier this year that it had 126 million daily active users.

In early 2016, he twice retweeted an obscure white supremacist account, @WhiteGenocideTM, that had directed a tweet at him ridiculing Jeb Bush, an opponent in the Republican primary. The since-suspended account, which regularly posted neo-Nazi propaganda and listed its location as “Jewmerica,” gained hundreds of followers in the days after Mr. Trump’s retweets.

By the time he faced off against Hillary Clinton, a perfect storm had coalesced on a more polarized and partisan Twitter — bringing together activists and trolls practiced at spreading conspiracy theories and hate, and Russian intelligence operatives seeking to foment discord. A how-to manual titled “Advanced Meme Warfare” circulated online with instructions for creating material to help the Trump campaign by trashing the Clintons.

That episode highlighted one of the ways the president sees information on Twitter. His feed regularly contains tweets from his son, Donald Jr., who follows and retweets alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian who pushes “white genocide” conspiracy theories and has promoted white nationalists on his YouTube channel.

The president shared a conspiracy-minded post by William Craddick, a right-wing writer who peddled the “pizzagate” hoax that Democratic politicians secretly ran a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria. “Russiagate,” Mr. Craddick wrote, “was designed in part to help the UK counter Russian influence by baiting the United States into taking a hard line against them.” And Mr. Trump sent out a tweet by Jack Posobiec, another pizzagate promoter, linking to a news story about Latino gang members stabbing and burning a teenager.

There is a lot more detail in the article. But, how do decent people fight this propaganda when it's become so influential?

There are two more articles that I'd like to mention, but I'll put them in my next posts, later today.

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/02/us/politics/trump-twitter-presidency.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk:

“Do you want me to settle this right now?”

There was no missing Mr. Trump’s threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Policy meetings are hijacked when Mr. Trump gets an idea for a tweet, drawing in cabinet members and others for wordsmithing. And as a president often at war with his own bureaucracy, he deploys Twitter to break through logjams, overrule or humiliate recalcitrant advisers and pre-empt his staff.

“He needs to tweet like we need to eat,” Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, said in an interview.

In a presidency unlike any other, where Mr. Trump wakes to Twitter, goes to bed with it and is comforted by how much it revolves around him, the person he most often singled out for praise was himself — more than 2,000 times, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

As much as anything, Twitter is the broadcast network for Mr. Trump’s parallel political reality — the “alternative facts” he has used to spread conspiracy theories, fake information and extremist content, including material that energizes some of his base.

Mr. Trump’s use of Twitter has accelerated sharply since the end of the special counsel’s Russia investigation and reached a new high as Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, the analysis shows. He tweeted more than 500 times during the first two weeks of October, a pace that put him on track to triple his monthly average. (The Times analyzed Mr. Trump’s tweets through Oct. 15. The total by the end of the month reached 11,887.)

His more than 66 million Twitter followers have become his private polling service, offering what he sees as validation for his performance in office. But fewer than one-fifth of his followers are voting-age Americans, according to a Times analysis of Pew Research national surveys of adults who use Twitter.

This is governing in the Trump era. For President Barack Obama, a tweet about a presidential proposal might mark the conclusion of a long, deliberative process. For Mr. Trump, Twitter is often the beginning of how policy is made.

“Suddenly there’s a tweet, and everything gets upended and you spent the week trying to defend something else,” said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “This person thrives on chaos. What we may find disconcerting or upsetting or whatever, it is actually what keeps him going.”

A turning point came in fall 2017, at the height of tensions with North Korea, when Mr. Trump tweeted that the rogue nation might not “be around much longer!” The country’s foreign minister called that a declaration of war. On Twitter, users wondered if the company would allow Mr. Trump to tweet his way into a nuclear conflict.

The response came the next day. Referring back to Mr. Trump’s online declaration, Twitter announced in a tweet that it took “newsworthiness” into account when evaluating whether to remove a post that violated its policies.

In an interview, Twitter executives said that newsworthiness had long figured into the company’s internal enforcement guidelines and that officials there had been formulating the announcement, which applied worldwide, months before Mr. Trump’s North Korea tweet. But former employees said they understood the announcement to be Trump-driven. Twitter did not want to be in the business of censoring the president.

Considering that Twitter was near bankruptcy prior to Trump's using tweets to make policy, criticize people, fire people, attack both friends and enemies, etc. my guess is that Twitter hadn't banned Trump for financial reasons.

Sometimes the president’s apparent fury on Twitter is meant to troll his critics and get a rise out of them, many of his closest aides said. But they still brace themselves, knowing that they are likely to be blindsided by one of his tweets. Aides who gather for the early-morning staff meetings in the West Wing said their agenda was regularly blown up when their phones simultaneously went off with a tweet from the boss.

Once Mr. Trump arrives in the West Wing — usually after 10 a.m. — Dan Scavino, the White House social media director, takes control of the Twitter account, tweeting as @realDonaldTrump from his own phone or computer. Mr. Trump rarely tweets in front of others, those close to him say, because he does not like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see the screen.

Instead, the president dictates tweets to Mr. Scavino, who sits in a closet-size room just off the Oval Office until Mr. Trump calls out “Scavino!” Often, he prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for the president to sign off on. (A single-page article that Mr. Scavino recently printed out for him ran to six pages after the fonts were enlarged, according to one person who saw it.)

According to data from YouGov, which polls about most of the president’s tweets, some of the topics on which Mr. Trump got the most likes and retweets — jabs at the N.F.L., posts about the special counsel’s investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud — poll poorly with the general public.

But people close to Mr. Trump said there was no dissuading him that the “likes” a tweet got were evidence that a decision or policy proposal was well received.

Last December, after Mr. Trump announced plans to withdraw some troops from Syria, lawmakers came to the White House to argue against it. According to Politico, Mr. Trump responded by calling in Mr. Scavino.

“Tell them how popular my policy is,” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Scavino, who described for the lawmakers social media postings that had praised Mr. Trump’s decision. Aides said that for Mr. Trump, his Twitter “likes” were proof that he had made the right call.

A very tiny percentage of Americans actually follow Trump on Twitter but apparently he believes if he gets a lot of likes, it means the country favors the things he tweets.

While some campaign aides say Mr. Trump’s tweets can be a distraction, they also view Twitter as an essential tool to present him as someone strong, willing to stand up to so-called political elites and what the president recently called the “unholy alliance of corrupt Democrat politicians, deep-state bureaucrats and the fake-news media.”

The aides seek to cultivate the image of a man who understands “regular people.” Mr. Trump’s team believes that his unvarnished writing, poor punctuation and increasing profanity on Twitter signals authenticity — a contrast to the polished, vetted, often anodyne social media style of most candidates.

Twitter, Ms. Conway said, is the president’s most potent weapon when it comes to bypassing the powerful people he believes have controlled the flow of information too long.

So, Trump plans on using twitter in his reelection campaign. Considering that his tweets are plastered all over the news, and social media, I guess it doesn't matter if one follows him or not, most of us know the garbage that he tweets.

 

[Lion IRC]

I'm surprised that, after all this time, people are still agitated by his now-predictable and kinda boring Twitter stuff.

 

[Rhea]

I'm surprised that, after all this time, people are still agitated by his now-predictable and kinda boring Twitter stuff.

It’s not his Twitters that bother anybody. It is the effect they have on the people who embrace them, and the effect those people have on our nation.

As you read SoHy’s quotes, you see that he stops cabinet meetings to have people help him tweet. Many of us in America are rightly bothered by that. As we are by the people who act on his malicious idiocy.


I am not surprised or bothered so much by the idiot dangerous stuff he does, but I am strongly bothered by the Americans who excuse it or embrace it. Espcially the GOP legislature.

 

[Lion IRC]

That NY Times piece and threads like this only serve to bolster the feedback loop of the Twitter phenomenon about which they are bothered.

 

[lpetrich]

Titled link: In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies - The New York Times

But with the arrival of Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, Twitter managed to connect the ultimate seat of power to the darkest corners of the web for the first time. There is little evidence that Mr. Trump harbors concerns about promoting accounts that traffic in fake or inflammatory material.

...
After Mr. Trump started tweeting on his own in early 2013 — he previously had help from an assistant — he was soon recycling misinformation.

... A how-to manual titled “Advanced Meme Warfare” circulated online with instructions for creating material to help the Trump campaign by trashing the Clintons.

“The idea is to stack up so much doubt, emotional appeals, and circumstantial evidence ON TOP of facts that we create a landslide of anti-Hill sentiment that permeates through society,” it said.

...
That episode highlighted one of the ways the president sees information on Twitter. His feed regularly contains tweets from his son, Donald Jr., who follows and retweets alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian who pushes “white genocide” conspiracy theories and has promoted white nationalists on his YouTube channel.

...
The content he chooses to retweet is similar to his own: mostly partisan attacks and praise for himself, with occasional inflammatory material mixed in.

Talk about living in a bubble.

In an email to the Times, Mr. Mitchell said he considered the president’s retweets “a hat-tip without an overt endorsement.” He believes that the president is deliberately provocative on Twitter to keep political enemies off balance and unable to “think strategically,” he said.

“Through his tweets, President Trump keeps the Democrats and media in a perpetually heightened emotional state, in this case offense and anger,” he wrote, adding that he respected QAnon’s leaders as “patriots and Trump supporters.”

In effect, Trump likes to troll his opponents, but that may be a side effect of his personality.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

That NY Times piece and threads like this only serve to bolster the feedback loop of the Twitter phenomenon about which they are bothered.

Trump is just threatening another federal witness. *yawn*

The wokeness of people that just can't let witness intimidation go is so predictable and just makes Trump do it more.

 

[lpetrich]

That NYT article also listed the 47 accounts that he follows on Twitter.

• 12 - conservative news media like Fox News
• 8 - current & former admin officials
• 8 - Trump-organization accounts
• 7 - family
• 6 - others, including some conservative social-media personalities
• 4 - current & former campaign officials
• 2 - GOP officials, including the only congressperson that he follows, Rep. Jim Jordan

Curiously not following Sen. Mitch McConnell or Sen. Chuck Schumer or Rep. Nancy Pelosi or Rep. Kevin McCarthy or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Schooling Trump on How To Do Twitter | Opinion he does not seem to have been paying much attention. His tweets are full of bragging about himself and anger at those who displease him.

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "Like it or not, Tlaib and Omar are fast becoming the face of the Democrat Party. Cortez (AOC) is fuming, not happy about this!" / Twitter
and she responded
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "" / Twitter
a tears-of-laughter emoji

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "You can’t Impeach someone who hasn’t done anything wrong!" / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "You are correct!
But you tried to extort a foreign government for personal gain, so here we are." / Twitter

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

That NYT article also listed the 47 accounts that he follows on Twitter.

• 12 - conservative news media like Fox News
• 8 - current & former admin officials
• 8 - Trump-organization accounts
• 7 - family
• 6 - others, including some conservative social-media personalities
• 4 - current & former campaign officials
• 2 - GOP officials, including the only congressperson that he follows, Rep. Jim Jordan

Curiously not following Sen. Mitch McConnell or Sen. Chuck Schumer or Rep. Nancy Pelosi or Rep. Kevin McCarthy or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Schooling Trump on How To Do Twitter | Opinion he does not seem to have been paying much attention. His tweets are full of bragging about himself and anger at those who displease him.

Let's not forget that Trump did manage to win the Presidency with this Twitter style.

 

[Lion IRC]

That NY Times piece and threads like this only serve to bolster the feedback loop of the Twitter phenomenon about which they are bothered.

Trump is just threatening another federal witness. *yawn*

The wokeness of people that just can't let witness intimidation go is so predictable and just makes Trump do it more.

Pretty much.

Someone on team Trump knows that it's more about the reaction to the reaction

 

[Gun Nut]

We need an app that uses your twitter account to monitor a list of users and automatically "not like" every tweet from them. Poison the data.

 

[TSwizzle]

It's hilarious how Twitter, even the name of the application suggests triteness, can get some people all riled up. The stable genius plays the MSM like a violin.

 

[Gun Nut]

It's hilarious how Twitter, even the name of the application suggests triteness, can get some people all riled up. The stable genius plays the MSM like a violin.

It's not Twitter... it's the Twit.