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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

I don't really have much of an opinion on how twitter should approach world leaders.

I'm more interested in the approach of world leaders to twitter. As far as I'm concerned, people receiving salaries from the taxpayer shouldn't be spending their time writing free copy for twitter. They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites, or press conferences covered by multiple media organizations.

If the president feels a need to push out realtime text snippets, it can be done via an RSS feed on whitehouse.gov, and people can consume it via whatever app / client they want. If twitter wanted to scrape that and provide access to it, fine, but they shouldn't be given a free monopoly on that content.

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It's not "free copy for twitter" anymore than a press briefing is "free copy for newspapers".

Leaders communicate wherever people are already reading and listening.

Today, Twitter is just as important of a conduit as newspapers or the evening news.

People already read Twitter and find it far more convenient to follow a world leader than to visit individual sites or set up an RSS reader.

Also you might be suffering from a legal misunderstanding -- Twitter doesn't get any kind of monopoly, free or otherwise, on someone's tweet. You keep the rights to your tweet.

There's zero difference between journalists reporting on a press conference and reporting on a tweet, except that tweets are instant while press conferences take time to set up.

And also that tweets are direct to the public, while when you read a journalist's article they might be omitting parts or spinning it.

> Leaders communicate wherever people are already reading and listening.

I don't disagree with your post, but do general Government communiques not come in the form of press releases to all willing outlets?

Perhaps Twitter should at itself to the list, and press releases come with an abridged 280 character surmisal that they could then use.

Some of them do, but others go out via Tweet, advertisements, physical signage, websites, email, and a variety of other channels.

The government has to fight the meme wars just like anyone else who wants to compete for attention.

I live in New York and I get different pieces of information from the government via pretty much every channel -- direct e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, websites, billboards, ads in the subway, post office mailings, newspapers, etc.

Different government agencies and officials at different levels (city, state, national) use all sorts of different communication methods.

Governments have been heavily involved in media campaigns across all channels as long as there's been media.

Press releases are just one communications channel among many. Twitter is just the ~newest in a very long line.

>Today, Twitter is just as important of a conduit as newspapers or the evening news.

Twitter is a terrible medium for discourse. You wouldn't suggest that world leaders communicate via TikTok, simply because it's popular.

"Important" and "terrible for discourse" are orthogonal.

TV is even more terrible for discourse, but somehow people got used to top officials making appearance on TV.

See, politicians are for people, not the other way around. They follow people to whatever venue people flock to, in order to be heard better.

In the ideal case, a politician would do AMA style engagements where they take questions from the public and give detailed replies.

Since that won’t happen for most politicians, I’ll take a televised press conference with some back and forth between reporters and the politician over a tweet any day.

If it got younger people engaged why would it be a bad thing?

You can't talk about policy (in a meaningful way) with memes. Our discourse is already much too simple. If any group of people needs to be pandered to, then they're clearly not actually interested in politics.

This seems pretty elitist. I think being able to communicate effectively and concisely is important. When Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech it was noteworthy for lasting minutes when normally politicians would go on for hours. Many critics said the same thing about the Gettysburg Address as you are saying about memes. For the time, that was so much shorter than a usual speech, it was effectively a sound bite (and hey, people are still talking about it today, wadda ya know?).

If someone can use memes to communicate effectively, awesome. Most people suck at discourse in general, it's not limited to memes.

If elitism is the opposite of populism, then so be it.

I also don't agree that the Gettysburg address is equivalent to speaking on Twitter.

It seems pretty odd you have such a disdain for populism, but I'm guessing you believe in democracy. If most people prefer to participate that way and vote as such, are you saying that the people are wrong? Because the whole point of democracy is letting the people decide for themselves what they want.

If you think democracy is fundamentally flawed though, then I guess your point makes more sense.

I genuinely don't want to take this to a negative place. So, please understand, I'm answering your question as best I can, and with positive intent.

I believe populism can be quite bad, which is part of why the founding fathers designed a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy. They were all well schooled in Greek and Roman history, and were afraid of the demagogues of Athens, and of other Greek city states. They believed that the will of the masses could be ignorant and capricious, and should be moderated by wiser more responsible representatives. Of course, they believed that the masses must have some say, (as do I) but that listening to every popular whim may not be the best thing for our country.

Fair enough. Let's just agree to disagree. Cheers.

Democracy allows for people to be wrong. Its mechanism for fixing wrong votes is to convince people that they should vote a different way, rather than forcing a new direction on them.

Having disdain for populism is well aligned with democracy. Shooting or torturing populists is not

You can and people do it all the time. I mean, I create and consume memes about complicated topics all the time (mostly related to the field of software I am in), so there is no reason that they can augment any discussion regardless of topic.

Younger people are very engaged in the culture war, they're also extremely ignorant but think they're not. A dangerous combination.

Twitter is a non-government owned software platform. It makes no sense to use it for exclusive official communications. Because, as we've seen, they can close any account at any time. even the us president

Trump in particular basing his presidency around twitter was super stupid. He could have and still can post anything he wants to trump.com, and it will be widely distributed on social media immediately

I'm always hesitant to base any major endeavor on a software platform that someone else owns. because...they own it. They can do whatever they want with their property

> Twitter is a non-government owned software platform. It makes no sense to use it for exclusive official communications. Because, as we've seen, they can close any account at any time. even the us president

There is nothing that requires official communications on Twitter to be exclusive to that platform.

Wouldn't the hosting company take down his server?

Presumably Trump can afford to pay for a few servers. They could even be colocated.

Ultimately however you connect to the internet it’s via someone else who can choose to cut you off.

Ultimately the problem is that Twitter et al is the new de facto public square. Politicians want to go where the people are, not to publish to an RSS feed that some single digit percentage of their audience (which will skew elite) will ever access.

Note also that there are other, broader consequences: Twitter operates the public square restriction from free speech provisions like the US First Amendment—it can regulate access and manipulate the dialogue to suit its own purposes to the detriment of the broader society, which is the whole point of provisions like 1A. Some are content that this isn’t a de jure public square, as though that will prevent us from suffering the de facto consequences.

I think the answer is to start regulating Twitter so it doesn’t have control over so much national and international dialogue. We might say that social media giants must behave according to the first amendment such that it is a “safe” space for politicians to interact. If we’re worried about preserving some sense of moderation, we could require social media giants to implement some common protocol so that they don’t own the dialogue, but only a view (in the SQL sense) into the dialogue.

I think the answer is to start regulating our government. Far more effective to write a law on how the president can use communication platforms than to regulate the current top communication platform.

It depends on what you’re solving for. I want to fix free speech and remove Twitter from the helm of democracy. That it doesn’t need to regulate world leaders is a bonus.

A key issue with politicians’ use of Twitter is that Twitter’s userbase is a very poor reflection of the wider population.

Politicians who are on Twitter, whether they know it or not, start to drift towards the views of Twitter users. Dopamine, like that which you get from from a popular tweet, is a powerful drug, and will alter peoples behaviour.

Aside from that, though, it seems the medium of Twitter has a remarkable ability to bring out people’s most toxic sides... it’s really not healthy.

I don't trust the media enough to honestly and accurately convey information from my elected officials to me.

And while press releases on whitehouse.gov are a step in the right direction, the fact that they are press releases usually makes them anodyne and uninteresting.

The best approach is the one we used to have: a non-partisan (or at least, bipartisan) press corps asking elected tough questions live on television. But that has been lost for some time now.

Why live?

Live means politicians will mispeak and can be interrupted before getting their message across.

That's also its advantage - the press can't selectivity edit it to push their viewpoint.

Do you also oppose the US President holding press conferences for privately owned broadcast TV channels?

I'm not. There's a natural scarcity of space for physical cameras and reporters. As far as I understand, the press themselves are largely responsible for figuring out these logistics via the WHCA. (Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.)

There isn't any practical scarcity for text streams coming from the White House though, so I can't think of a reason why consuming them should be tied to a closed platform like Twitter, other than marginal costs of setting up and operating the infrastructure (perhaps not so marginal once we start talking about government contracts?).

Your point is good but I think the reality is just really mundane: the government could put out its own text streams and multi-publish them to different platforms, but it’s just not there yet. There’s no fire under anyone’s ass to get it done, if it’s even occurred to anyone in a position to do something about it in the past uh... 14 years?

However I would be fully on board with Twitter banning world leaders and IP blocking their capitals including the entire city of Washington. They won’t, that’s a value destroying proposition, but a man can dream.

Twitter isn't "a closed platform" in the sense that is relevant here. If I want to read the President's tweets without a Twitter account, I can.

Well, sort of. Not if they remove it. The fact that they (mostly) haven't exercised this control so far over world leaders' tweets is a matter of internal policy at Twitter.

That's not the sense that I was using, and I don't think it's a relevant point either. What's important IMO is that the platform and the data are not controlled by elected officials.

I can live with it if there's a pool of such channels and a system for sharing access across them, which is more or less the case for white house press conferences.

If the president were to just pick one favorite channel and only ever be interviewed by them and have them as the only invitee for press conferences, then no.

PBS, NPR, the BBC, and Al Jazeera all have seats in the White House press room.

Yes. But I'd go further. All holders of US political office at all levels should be unable to restrict any conference or interview in which they take part to any single interviewer or news agency, so they cannot control who asks the questions or who airs the event.

For several decades, US Presidents have been able to avoid hard questions by cherry picking interviewers or networks in order to "massage their message". That isn't news and it shirks their responsibility to answer hard questions. Tweets are just the next step in the evolution of accountability avoidance.

We did away with royal proclamations long ago for damned good reason: you must answer to the people.

I think it is reasonable as long as there are barriers for consumption and people can be selectively limited in their ability to interact with the broadcasts.

Maybe if Twitter was brought in as a government contractor, including the inability to restrict people from interacting with government tweets and accounts (any non-government entities would fall under the private business side of things and not be included in this restriction) then I think it would be reasonable for the government to use Twitter.

Given that the list of organisations [0] consists of public and private ones, your statement reads somewhat disingenuous to me.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_press_corps

or that CPAN is a non-profit run by the networks to bring you full realtime video access into the senate, congress etc?

The problem is that all leaders have an inherent conflict of interest between the following two goals:

1. Doing the job

2. Maintaining power

The problem is, again, two-fold:

1. The things you need to do to serve the first goal are often different from the things you need to do to serve the second, and

2. You must achieve the second goal in order to even attempt to achieve the first.

That's the fundamental problem. It has nothing to do with Twitter per se. It's an inherent feature of all large-scale societal interactions.

This is a great point and this[1] video gets at the same thing with much more detail and examples

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Yes, that is a truly fantastic video. Should be required viewing for everyone.

[UPDATE] There's a book too:

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

The stated conflict of interest is only really an issue in democracies, or other forms of representative governments. Otherwise, spot-on.

Why only in democracies? Dictators have to work to stay in power too. It doesn't just happen automatically.

A demonhunt ?

'Just answer me, nor glamorized regent, whose freedom we the folk, are going to fight for?'

'For the freedom of foreigners? ...is this going to be a castrated migrationthespian?'

'Cos meet the Jones isn't radical enough anymore?'

(-;

You have it backwards. People aren't born world leaders. In the America at least, they start out as private citizens, and run for office, and while doing so communicate with people in order to spread their message.

What you are asking is for people to shut down their own personal social media accounts when they win an elected position. That doesn't seem like good policy - users will continue to use the same communication channels to their elected representatives.

> They should be communicating with the public via government operated websites

Most everything a government official or board or committee does is on the public record. Saying they cannot use 3rd party tools to organize, document, and communicate their actions would be more expensive and time consuming for them, which ultimately takes them away from the business of actually governing.

I'm not a fan of Twitter but it's definitely not just free copy for them; it's like a new communication tech has been invented (i.e. telegram -> phone) but this time it did not have immediate military application (I guess) and government wasn't the one doing the research and unfortunately the tech didn't become as open as the Internet or phone lines. My guess would be that large social media platforms should be part of telecomms now. Calling someone is not as common as it used to, it's now all SM.

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