Oh please. The rest of the world doesn’t take Twitter as seriously as Americans do. And truth be told, Americans shouldn’t take it seriously either.
The platform derives power from the audience. Stop giving it your power.
The platform derives power from the audience. Stop giving it your power.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274565/monthly-active-in... [1]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/
I have to regularly stop and check that "ha, yes, that's a very USA-centric take on things and does not represent reality outside of it".
https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...
Twitter is very US-centric.
As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets (nobody is going to go to war over a tweet without fact checking it) but access to private messages is an entirely different story.
Bismarck released his carefully worded readout in the evening of Thursday, 14 July 1870. Assuming the french were "making the bridge" for Bastille Day, they would have had one working day (Monday, 18 July 1870) to fact check, but I don't know if they took even that, because according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Franco-Prussian_... , on 19 July 1870 "Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires, delivered Napoleon [III]'s declaration of war at the Foreign Office" in Berlin.
https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11... suggests the french were already mobilising on 14 July itself, and that while telegraph use may technically have been possible, US diplomats were still communicating by snail mail with State.
That emotion won over fact checking is supported by Ch. I p.3
> Washburne dismissed the accuracy of the Ems telegram because it had been challenged by King Wilhelm. "There is no truth in the reports concerning the indignity which the King of the North German Confederation offered to Benedetti, the Envoy of France." Washburne based this statement on a published denial by the King which he had read in Cologne while returning to Paris. Though he questioned the veracity of the Ems telegram, Washburne still credited it with arousing the French Chamber of Deputies to vote for war.
(the war vote was Friday, 15 July. It might be interesting to see if any french papers had carried Wilhelm's version of events.)
Depends how tense the situation already was. A well-timed tweet could be enough to tip things over the edge if both sides were already on the edge, and I don't think we're too far away from that.
Those tweets can make them more itchy than they already are in a tense situation and nervous persons make more mistakes.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of journalists/new people, are active on Twitter. I would expect them to be over represented given the amount of reports based or citing tweets, but I don’t know.
The "muh stock market" argument is stupid; there are punters who take it seriously, and obviously, it's a great vola signal for automated traders. So what? Rumors were propagated before twitter and will be propagated long after it goes the way of other useless companies like pets dot com.