Twitter Employee Who Deleted Trumps Account Being Hailed Hero | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Employee Who Deleted Trumps Account Being Hailed Hero

newsweek.com

32 pointsendswapper35 comments

This was a very futile and stupid gesture on that employee's part.

The important aspect of this story that we should be talking about is the incredibly bad idea it is for the POTUS to use Twitter has is primary communications platform. Twitter is not a defense contractor, they haven't been contracted by the government at all. The only have to operate by their own user agreement, which is wholly insufficient for the role they are playing.

An unknown number of employees with unknown backgrounds have the ability to put words into Trump's mouth, and that doesn't include anyone who manages to hack into a company that doesn't have to conform to government security regulations. They could crash the stock market on a whim. They could destabilize world peace. The potential damage is almost incalculable.

And the person at fault is Trump. Twitter isn't obligated to take care of this guy. He shouldn't be using it in the first place. He just doesn't care.

"This was a very futile and stupid gesture on that employee's part."

I think thats how most non-violent activism / movements starts. As a futile effort. If his actions starts the dialog on how dangerous it is for the POTUS to tweet from unreliable communication medium than its not futile at all.

>If his actions starts the dialog on how dangerous it is for the POTUS to tweet from unreliable communication medium than its not futile at all.

But that dialog started a long time ago... half the country thinks Trump is a hero for his unfiltered Twitter rants, believing he's doing an end run around the DNC controlled media and Deep State establishment, and the other half was pointing out that this would be a problem even before he was elected, based on his existing Twitter history.

Previous Presidents and other governments have official Twitter accounts... and Trump has the same free speech rights as everyone else. The problem isn't that the President is tweeting, it's just Twitter, it shouldn't matter, and I think the governments of the rest of the world know that it shouldn't matter. The problem is that the American people elected a shitposting troll as their leader and now can't stop him without undermining their own principles.

They didn't do it because they thought that tweeter is too dangerous for official communication they did it because they disagree with the current POTUS.

If they had the ability to shutdown whitehouse.gov they would've done so just as well.

You sound so certain!

About as certain as on can be in the current climate. As much as I dislike trump the left has gone off the rails I wonder what would’ve happened if some country singer would’ve released an album with a lynched Obama on the cover or if Anne Coulter would’ve posted a picture holding his decapitated head.

> They haven't been contracted by the government at all. The only have to operate by their own user agreement, which is wholly insufficient for the role they are playing.

That's probably not the case.

For instance, Twitter had special logic in place to handle the transition between @POTUS and @POTUS44 accounts:

http://fortune.com/2017/01/20/twitter-donald-trump-president...

It's quite likely they could have a special user agreement specifically set up for the White House, which predicted some sort of QoS and special security measures.

hmm, wasn't aware of that, thanks.

Wrong logic @realdonaldtrump is different from @potus45.

Twitter is just Twitter. Obviously he uses different channels to authorize military strikes.

I think that the lack of the media to provide "context" or lack there of and "fact checking" before hearing what he has to say first hand is what infuriates the media about Trump's Twitter. However, with Twitter, if you need any of this you can just read the replies to his tweets which is filled with the usual partisan brawling.

"This was a very futile and stupid gesture on that employee's part."

Doesn't look like it to me. You're talking and thinking about it, aren't you?

Futile in that it lasted for all of 11 minutes, and I didn't need this to happen to have been thinking about it.

Also it's a reference to Animal House. It just... seemed to fit.

So actions justify the means? No harm was done to anyone but the employee, which could even be prosecuted for that, so everything was pretty much useless. And of course, if you're offering a service to someone, you're supposed to ensure that the person enjoys the full experience of that service, even if it is Donald Trump. There are right places and means for protests.

The mere fact that an employee had the power to disable a politician's account is enough to argue for more regulation over social media. The timing is perfect too.

So everybody loses, except the sctual target.

Since we're on the topic, I'd like to point out that DT routinely breaks Twitters TOS with respect to abusive behavior [0] but twitter won't kill the goose that lays the golden publicity eggs. Now we find out that they were trying to sell massive amounts of ads to RT [1]. Remember kids, social media is not your friend.

[0]: https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311 [1]: https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/01/twitter-offered-russian-...

Do you think that they should ban his account? I'm personally pretty pleased that the most powerful person in the world has an open channel that clearly nobody is able to control (otherwise half of the shit he writes wouldn't be approved, clearly).

Coalesced power is the greatest threat to those without it, and there is no greater than the executive branch of the US. As asinine as most of his posts are, I much prefer insight from my enemies than my friends.

I do actually. He's a troll - plain and simple. Make that ahole go to Gab where he belongs.

Think about that for a second. The president of the USA is a twitter troll. You really can't make this stuff up.

I don't think he's a troll, at least not in the sense of the word I understand, which implies intent.

DT doesn't tweet things he doesn't really believe in or care about just to rile people up: he says what he really means and he has no idea of the consequences (and doesn't care).

It's literally the opposite of a troll.

Which, of course, is terrifying when it's the president of the US.

"DT doesn't tweet things he doesn't really believe in or care about"

Really? Funny how he cares about Hillary when he's getting heat in the press. Then tweets distractions all day long. No, he's a troll, he trolls the press and his detractors with the twitter platform.

Trolling is all about creating a stink. There's different kinds of trolling, that come from different places. Some of it is because the troll really believes what he/she is saying. Some of it is saying whatever gets a rise out of your target, regardless of what you believe. In all cases a troll is a troll.

There are DT is, in the literal sense of the phrase, king troll.

If trolling is really about "creating a stink", regardless of intent/belief, then doesn't that kill it as a negative term? Are muckrakers trolls?

Wow, Twitter is selectively enforcing it's rules? Shocking.

Well... a lot of people routinely break Twitters TOS with respect to abusive behavior (and other things) and don't get shut down. So there is that.

This is super off-topic, but it's really depressing to see the performance, usability, and intention of a website like Newsweek's. I turned off my ad blocker and cleared my cache and found:

- The site auto-plays a video with nothing but music in it, and continues to load further consecutive videos after the first is finished. - The site downloads about 20mb of content by the end of the first video. I paused at the midpoint of the second, and my browser is still climbing (I killed the tab past 60 MB) - There were over 1300 requests made by the end of the first video. - The console showed 15 errors and 10 warnings, plus a handful of what looks like debug logs. - The ads on the screen literally push all of the text of the article past the fold. - Firefox slowed to a crawl across all tabs (this post became hard to type) and my computer kicked the fans on high (I have a pretty high-spec'd macbook pro with little else running).

I don't see how either advertisers or content producers benefit from a relationship like this — they're both trying to get me to interact with Newsweek.com, yet it's incredibly hard to do so.

President Trump's use of Twitter, a new communications technology, to communicate with the general public and world is no different than Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)'s use of the then new technology radio -- weekly addresses to the nation and press conferences -- to communicate with the nation and as it happens bypass the almost uniformly hostile newspapers of the 1930s.

Trump is no more using Twitter to communicate policy directives to US government agencies than FDR was using radio. He still has to formulate and sign executive orders and go through the legally proscribed channels as the successful legal challenges to the original Muslim ban show.

Rather than try to censor the President of the United States his critics should rationally and clearly critique his actual policies and actions.

>>his critics should rationally and clearly critique his actual policies and actions.

I agree in sentiment, but that isn't really how it works anymore (maybe it never did?). It's just a never-ending barrage of soundbites and 'outrages' because that's what moves joe public.

Trump is not the first President to use Twitter. Barack Obama had at least three twitter accounts:

http://time.com/3882715/president-obama-now-has-his-own-twit...

Obama in fact tweeted about various controversial topics, producing outrage among generally conservative Republicans:

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/09/16/president-ob...

Don't. Follow.

But my connections...

Don't. Follow. You don't like it, ignore it.

He can't be ignored

Yes, he can be ignored when addressing from Twitter.

https://twitter.com/en/tos:

"You understand and agree that the Services are provided to you on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis."

and

"The Twitter Entities make no warranty or representation and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or any Content;"

Doesn't feel like something you should be conducting international diplomacy with...

Well there’s no risk of it being used for diplomacy

What the guy did just sheds more light on twitters double standard with @realdonaldtrump account. They are just treating him with kid gloves.

I bet this will get the employee plenty of high-fives and maybe a few paid-for drinks at the bar, but it won't help him replace that job. Any employer would have to ask themselves whether they'd do something similar to one of their high-profile customers.

Maybe this will spur Trump to create his own Twitter-like stream on Whitehouse.gov. That would be better for politicians, a separate political stream for them, that Twitter can API into.

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