I’m going to start this thing where I highlight I tweet I saw going around and then explain why it’s bad to retweet it, highlighting the general misinformation that it carries. I can’t do this on Twitter because, you know, 140 characters.
Twitter in Trump era:
1) Trump bans national parks from tweeting, even on safety
2) Twitter forces users to follow Trump, even if they block— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 21, 2017
The above tweet is going around right now. I saw it first on my gaming account. It’s one those tweets that make it sound like it’s a slam-dunk, open-and-shut-case, can’t-possibly-argue-with-this-logic kind of thing.
Wellllllll.
There’s just a lot to unpack there. And that’s why Twitter and Facebook are so dangerous to political discourse.
First of all, Twitter is a private organization, and Trump doesn’t run it. It is likely that a group in the White House staff runs that account, possibly even the very same people who ran Obama’s feed. I would be surprised if Trump himself uses it, because why would he? He’s got his own account.
Moving on.
I’ll paraphrase Hanlon’s razor again: Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
On “Twitter forces users to follow Trump,” my guess is that they made a list of people who were following @POTUS on a particular date, and then used that list to manually set those users to follow @POTUS again after they had renamed @POTUS to @POTUS44. It’s likely they made that list long before the Inauguration, as I imagine they prepared it well in advance. In other words, long before everyone unfollowed @POTUS.
Now that I think about it, it’s possible that the White House is the one who did what I’ll call the Follower Migration. It could be done through the Twitter API, I would think. Follow people, that is. Who knows? Let’s try looking for some actual facts about this:
Here’s an article from Wired, which I would generally consider to be a trusted source for technical news: Twitter insists it isn’t making everyone follow @POTUS. Basically what I theorized. They are having to manually do this migration with a script. It confirms that Twitter is the agent making the change, not a government agency. Look there, I did some research and learned a thing. It’s what everyone should do before retweeting something. I know, it’s hard. It’s why I stopped political blogging. It’s impossible to keep up with the speed of Twitter retweets.
By the way, yes I’m following @POTUS. I’m an informed citizen. Democracy depends on me.
On “Trump bans national parks from tweeting,” this is an oversimplification of what actually happened. I saw this article on The Hill before I saw the retweet: Interior Dept. banned from tweeting after posting photo of inauguration crowd. I’m still a bit undecided about the credibility of The Hill. It seems like a gossip rag for political wonks, but a lot of politicos reference it. They certainly spam their stories a lot on Twitter, if nothing else.
Anyway the actual source of the story is The Washington Post, which I consider a credible news source: Interior Department reactivates Twitter accounts after shutdown following inauguration. Somebody retweeted those unflattering inauguration photo comparisons from @NatlParkService.
A government official familiar with the stand-down said the agency needed to investigate whether the retweets were purposeful, “errant” or “whether we’ve been hacked.”
Sounds plausible to me.
So even as that retweet saying Trump “bans national parks from tweeting” is flying around today, @NatlParkService is back online, posting tweets. And this may come as a shock to people, but the federal government has always had strict guidelines about social media engagement, which were developed during Obama’s administration.
Personally, I doubt Trump ever even knew about it. It’s unlikely he was personally involved in any of it. He was at the Inaugural Ball or something.
[Updated to add link to Dept. of Interior social media guidelines.]
