Tag: Twitter

Categories
Asides

What social media showed us in 2017

On May 26, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio to talk with the American people about mobilizing for war. The address was the 14th “fireside chat” by the president, who during the Depression began the practice of using the airwaves to address Americans directly.

In “No Ordinary Time,” her history of the Roosevelt administration on the home front in World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that during such talks the public could imagine that they were sitting beside the president in his study.

Kearns Goodwin quotes Richard Strout, a journalist who worked for The New Republic during those years. “You felt he was talking to you,” Strout recalled about FDR. “Not to 50 million others but to you personally.”

The idea of talking directly to Americans (and the world) found its footing anew in 2017 thanks to social media. Twitter alone reaches more than three times as many people each day as FDR reached via the radio.

Just over a year ago, Leslie Stahl of CBS News asked then President-elect Donald Trump whether he planned, after he became president, to keep up the use of Twitter that he had wielded during the campaign.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump replied. “I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication… It’s where it’s at… I really believe that, the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.”

As we now know, Trump has not held back. In 2017, he used Twitter to speak to supporters. But he also used it to endorse a hate group, antagonize allies, threaten nuclear war, bully civil servants, and sow discord at home and abroad.

Of course, social media works two ways. When Trump appeared to disinvite the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the White House, LeBron James, who reaches nearly as many people on Twitter as the president, rebuked him.

As Christopher Clarey noted on Friday in the Times, social media also gives athletes the means to amplify their messages – an opportunity for activism that many athletes have seized this year. Clarey notes:

What is evident is that the internet’s capacity to make the distant seem personal is not going away. Whether they are asked political questions or not, athletes, like other celebrities, will continue to be able to deliver their messages — be they solipsistic or deeply civic — directly and immediately to the public, no gatekeepers required.

Experts may debate whether a president actually can launch a nuclear strike at the touch of a button. But this year has showed that a president can risk apocalypse at the touch of a smartphone.

If anything, 2017 underscored that we are less likely to experience the moment at a remove. The year also highlighted, as the reaction to the tweet by James – which was liked by seven times as many people as the tweet by Trump that provoked it – the collective intelligence that modern media make possible.

Abraham Lincoln died a dozen years before Thomas Edison invented the first device that could record and playback sound. We infer what the 16th president sounded like by piecing together accounts of those who heard him speak.

Now, thanks to Twitter, we know what the president just watched on cable news.

“They can’t handcuff him,” Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for the Times, told CNN recently. “They can’t break his fingers to keep him from tweeting. They do tell him: ‘Please don’t do this.’ He does these things anyways.”

Of course, the technology does not release the messenger from responsibility for his message.

As it happens, one of the protests that resonated the loudest this year was also the quietest.

It began a year earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, sat during the national anthem, a day after tweeting a message that compared the American and Confederate flags.

At least one reporter captured the portent of the moment. “At a time when NFL players are criticized for not speaking out on social issues, Kaepernick has provided a very significant and conspicuous gesture,” wrote Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk. “As the team noted, it’s his right to do so. But given that Kaepernick opted to make a stand by sitting during the traditional pregame honoring of the country and its flag — which is so tightly woven into the DNA of the NFL — there surely will be a reaction.”

Categories
Politics

Trump unloads via Twitter, aka Saturday

On the day after Labor Day in 1973, Elizabeth Drew, a reporter for The New Yorker, told her editor she had “an intuition” that within a year the U.S. would change president and vice president.

“At the time, this was a seemingly outlandish thought, but I go a lot on instinct and I just sensed it,” Drew writes in the introduction to “Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall," her book about that time.

The Watergate scandal had not yet snared Nixon, but “there was already plenty of evidence that serious wrongdoing had taken place” in the administration, Drew writes.

Saturday also felt like a day when the country might have a new president within a year.

The morning began with Donald Trump unleashing a fusillade of tweets in which he said that presidents have “complete power” to pardon aides (and, perhaps, themselves) and complained about an “intelligence leak” that allowed the Washington Post to report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions discussed the presidential campaign with Russia’s ambassador last year.

He also blasted the “fake news,” despite sitting for an hour-long interview on Wednesday with The New York Times. “Look, I think he loves the press,” said Maggie Haberman, one the reporters who interviewed Trump.

The frenzy of social media followed a week in which Trump lashed out at Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and hinted that White House aides are looking for ways to discredit prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is leading the investigation.

Mueller is reportedly examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses.

According to a Gallup poll published Friday, Trump held a job approval of 38.8% in the three months that ended June 19. That’s 23 points below the historical norm and the lowest such rating in a comparable period in the 72 years that Gallup has assessed job approval. (Trump’s rating in the first three months of his presidency also set a new low.)

The discovery on Saturday afternoon of old tweets by Anthony Scaramucci show there was a time when the new White House communications director thought two of his boss' rivals might make better presidents than would Trump.

“Odd guy, so smart, no judgment,” Scaramucci tweeted in February 2012 about Newt Gingrich after Trump said he would endorse the former House speaker for president.

Two months earlier, Scaramucci praised Mitt Romney via Twitter for a decision to “stay out of the Trump spectacle.”

Scaramucci deleted both tweets.

About an hour later, he deleted a tweet from April 2012 in which he called Hillary Clinton “incredibly competent” and expressed hope she might run for president in 2016. Scaramucci also erased tweets of support for “strong gun control laws.”

Scaramucci owned his decision to delete the tweets. “Past views evolved & shouldn’t be a distraction,” he wrote. “I serve [the president’s] agenda & that’s all that matters.”

So much for principles.

Still, in 118 characters, the communications director showed more openness than Trump has since announcing his run for the presidency.

Categories
Privacy

How the government uses social media to monitor protestors

The death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 while in the custody of Baltimore police touched off a wave of protests in that city about civil rights and the department’s treatment of African-Americans.  Days later, as protests mounted, police monitoring social media noticed that kids from a local high school planned to skip class to join a protest at a nearby mall. The department deployed officers to intercept and turn back the students.

The summary of the surveillance comes courtesy of Geofeedia, a Chicago company that sells software that allows users, including police departments across the U.S., to track the whereabouts of people based on searches of data posted to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks. According to marketing materials posted by Geofeedia on its website, location-based monitoring of social media activity allowed police in Baltimore “to stay one step ahead of the rioters” and, by running social media photos through facial recognition software, “discover rioters with outstanding warrants and arrest them directly from the crowd.”

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We know of the monitoring thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the information via records requests to law enforcement agencies in California. A report released Oct. 11 by the group documents how social media companies provided data about users to Geofeedia that comes directly from their servers.

Though both Facebook and Instagram later cut off the feeds, both companies provided police access to data that allowed Geofeedia to sort by specific topics, hashtag or location. Twitter, which also has since ended the practice, provide searchable access to its database of tweets.

As the ACLU noted, the social networks that supplied data for use in monitoring all have expressed publicly their support for activism and free speech.

“Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Black Lives Matter and expressed sympathy after Philando Castile’s killing, which was broadcast on Facebook Live,” Matt Cagle, an attorney for the ACLU who authored the report, wrote in a blog post. “Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went to Ferguson. Above all, the companies articulate their role as a home for free speech about important social or political issues.”

“Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color,” Cagle added.

For its part, Geofeedia says it has protections in place to ensure that its technology is not used to infringe civil rights.

Though data feeds from the companies have legitimate applications – investors, for example, use data sets from the companies to learn early of problems that can affect stocks, e.g., someone tweets about about his friend becoming ill after eating at Chipotle. The data also can help in finding missing persons. But giving it to the government for use in surveillance can chill the exercise of basic freedoms.

The ACLU is calling on social networks to adhere to guidelines that include a prohibition on supplying data access to developers who are providing software for government surveillance. The networks also should develop clear and open policies that bar use of data feeds for surveillance, and should monitor developers to spot violations, the ACLU says.