O Say Can You Please Entry 16

O Say Can You Please Entry 16: To Tweet or Not to Tweet (That Is Our President)

    The New York Times just published an incredibly interesting article on our current President’s history on Twitter. That may not seem very important, but Trump has an extensive catalog of ridiculous tweets. These include -- but are not certainly not limited to -- incidents of bullying, wacky conspiracy theories, and befuddling typos. It’s a dumpster fire of unintentional self-parody, and I (along with many others) see an opportunity to riff on it and wait for the inevitable “#MAGA” comments. Let’s just get on with this.

    The article opens by detailing the evolution of “#FakeWhistleblower.” It was first tweeted out by an obscure far-right account that has tweeted in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This fringe online movement believes that the world’s elite are all liberal, Satanic pedophiles, and that President Trump is the only one who can stop them from staying in control forever. Aside from sounding perfectly at home in North Korean propaganda (if you replace Trump with the Kim family, of course), this is probably the most outlandish, yet derivative, conspiracy theory I have ever heard. That is magnified by the fact that at least one popular conspiracy theory says that 9/11 was an inside job, so this is really saying a lot.

    With that in mind, let’s get back on topic. What happened was that various far-right figures then re-used the hashtag, and the President noticed, using it himself in a tweet on Sept. 30. Usage then spiked, died back down, and was in a series of less pronounced spikes as of October 10. In other recent tweets, he has accused the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, of treason and labelled his opponents in the Republican Party as “human scum.” Trump’s a Republican himself, by the way. However, the real problem here is that he’s taking an Anakin Skywalker approach to politics, and that goes a little something like this.

Source: Reddit

    Not to mention, it doesn’t help anything that many tweets intended for the President’s eyes include white nationalist and other derogatory hashtags and comments that I’m not typing up. Yes, filters are able to screen out some offensive material, but the algorithms aren’t efficient enough to block it all. Because of this, roughly 1,000 tweets per minute make their way onto his feed, according to the New York Times. No wonder he can’t do anything consequential, considering his phone is always buzzing. That gets my attention when it happens once, let alone constantly. More information on this buzzing matter can be found in the links provided throughout the article.