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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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