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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

> Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform?

I don't use Twitter, and your reasoning is a complete non-sequitur.

I don't play golf, and the President plays lots of it. How is that possible? By... my not playing golf.

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Your analogy to golf is completely missing the point. I don't need to play or even care about golf if the President does, but if he tweets something on twitter then the only way I can validate the source of truth is by using twitter. When these tweets can have major policy and economic impacts I think it's a whole lot more important than golf.

Anything important will make the news.

Where the definition of important is defined by the News, yes.

So I need only check Twitter if I wish to see inanities, yes.

What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world, whether or not he uses a 9 iron or a driver to get the ball out of the sand trap does not.

You can't even conflate the two. Twitter is his method of communicating to us. He doesn't use the media like previous president's.

> What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world

But will be widely reported in every other media channel anyway, so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly. In fact, you might gain a little useful filtering, depending on your range of new outlet choices of course, and conversely there is a sort of reverse filter because you are less likely to miss things that are rather quickly deleted.

"so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly"

You lose the credibility of a primary source.

Twitter is not credible as a primary source to start with, tweets are routinely removed when people don't get the reaction they wanted.

There's no harm in combining outlets but the media has historically skewed what they report for ratings. It's a business like every other.

I guess we all must have forgotten just how bad the reporting was in 2016 with his <1% chance of winning.

I'll take a more direct source than one that is linked through a web of news sites so it's impossible to find the original source. "Experts say"

Twitter whether you like it or not is Trump's primary communication to the US public.

I don't use Twitter, yet I still hear what the President says on Twitter.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't exactly sway my opinion all that strong.

Just because you can get it elsewhere doesn't mean that the source you're getting it from isn't biased one way or another.

The difference is that his golf swings aren't statements of government policy.

Despite what the minority thinks, anything which is a statement of government policy will be widely reported in news sources.

Twitter is not a requirement. I don't understand how anyone could possibly think it was, or be insulted by people saying it isn't. It seems like a cack-handed attempt at advertising to insist that everyone must use Twitter.

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