What Trump's Tweets Mean for Twitter, and Democracy

the office of President of the United States. And we now have a new president, Donald J. Trump. They're going to be lots of fascinating tech storylines to watch over the next four years. Cybersecurity, the economic impacts of automation, the reinvigorated fight over net neutrality. But the thing that's going to be most visible to the general public, at least at first, is the way that the president communicates publicly. Ah. Yes, the infamous Trump Twitter account. And here's the thing. Trump

tweets a lot. He uses the account at real Donald Trump, and since Friday afternoon he has controlled the official President of the United States account as well, that's at potus. For over a year, many people have been waiting with bated breath for that moment that shows how Trump's style of tweeting would become a political liability. It looked like we had gotten there a few times at least during the campaign, but but clearly it never came. I mean,

he did win well. Just to remind us, Josh, what kind of messages are we talking about here, Yeah, I pulled a couple of examples to start with. Here's one from June, right when Trump started running druggies, drug dealers, rapists, and killers are coming across the southern border. When will the US get smart and stop this travesty? And here's one since Trump has been elected. China steals United States and Navy research drone in international waters, rips it out

of water, and takes it to China in unprecedented act. Yes, he initially misspelled unprecedented, so it said unprecedented. And here's one more that got a lot of attention. In addition to winning the Electoral College in the landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. Trump tweets nearly every day, so this is just a flavor of what he's posted. We pulled out these tweets in particular because they raise a few

thorny issues. The one about Mexican immigrants, for example, raises all sorts of questions about presidential decorum. The tweet about China shows how a single message could put years of delicate diplomacy into jeopardy. And the last tweet, where Trump refers to quote millions of people who voted illegally, well, that raises difficult questions about fact checking the president. There's no evidence at all of widespread voter fraud, but millions of people we'll see tweets like this, Hi, I'm Brad

Stone and I'm Joshua Boosting. This is our first episode of Decrypted since Donald Trump officially took office, so we're exploring the new president's feelings about technology and specifically his love for Twitter. Twitter was a major form of communication for Donald Trump the candidate, and even after winning the election, Trump kept setting the news agenda with his early morning tweets.

Many people thought his tweeting would slow down after he won, but there's every indication that he plans to continue using it now that he's in office. Yeah, it's been controversial, to say the least. On the one hand, Twitter, let's Trump talk directly to voters, but as quick fire tweets, sometimes poorly thought out, have been aimed at everyone from union leaders in Indiana to the government of China to the media itself. It's creating a new paradigm for diplomats,

journal us and of course, ordinary voters. We'll take a look at why Trump's use of Twitter marks such a break with the past, what this means for the press, and why despite all this attention, Twitter is still struggling to grow as a company. Here's one tricky problem. Some of Trump's tweets have probably violated Twitter's own rules against harassment. The Washington Post ran an op ed calling for Twitter

to ban the president elect. Far hot Manjou, who writes a technology column for The New York Times, said the company would be within its rights to ban him, though he advised they shouldn't do it. Twitter has shut down a couple of people's accounts during this campaign. It's often been because they use the platform to attack other people personally. Now, Trump has a tendency to call people out by name himself, and when you're president of the United States, that carries

a lot of weight. Here's a tweet that Trump posted in early December after he won the election. Chuck Jones, who is president of United steel Workers, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country. Oh yeah, there was the famous tweet from last summer directed at a former Miss Universe named Alicia Machado. Did crook and Hillary help disgusting check out sex tape and past Alicia m become a U S citizen so that she could

use her in that debate. Now it doesn't seem like there actually was a sex tape, and Trump was criticized widely for this. Some Mexican currency traders recently said their government should just buy Twitter and shut it down because that would be cheaper than the negative impact of the president's hostile tweets have had on the value of the pace. So I think that last thing was a joke. Yeah, but maybe one of those jokes where you laugh as

you say what you actually mean. Either way, it does make you think, what are the consequences of this shift in the way the President of the United States communicates with the world. Twitter started out with high ideals. On its website, it says this mission is to quote give everyone the power to create and air ideas and information instantly without barriers. Maybe they have succeeded it, although perhaps

not quite in the way they initially imagined. I asked Twitter to discuss its role in politics and incoming Trump administration, but they said the subject was too sensitive. Luckily, the person who led Twitter as partnerships with government officials and politicians for the last six years actually left the company right after the election. Yeah. His name is Adam Sharp, and I gave him a call, and when I did so, he said he was hibernating in his house in Connecticut,

kind of recovering from the election. But he did agree to let me come up and visit. I showed up on a frigid day in January, just a few weeks before the inauguration. Adam opened the door. He was wearing a striped collared shirt and it was tucked in even though he was in his own house and wasn't even wearing shoes. So more of a d C guy than

a Silicon Valley guy. Yeah, it seemed that way. Before worked for Twitter, Adam was actually a staff around the Hill And when he talks about Twitter, you can hear him just layering the technology on top of his favorite Washington cliches. At the end of the day, politics is personal. It's like fee old. Typically, all politics is local. People want to have that ground level connection. The best way to get a vote is still what it was a hundred years ago, the handshake, the look in your eye.

I'm running for office. Can I have your vote? It's hard to scale that to three million people. During his six years of Twitter, he's really seen the platform grow from nothing in the political world. Yeah, when Adam took over in two thousand and ten, only of people in Congress even had Twitter accounts. It was his job to go from door to door on the hill and show incoming lawmakers how the service even worked. Many offices that I would meet with in social media was something given

to the junior most person. It was the new hire or the intern right out of school. Who you get all that social stuff? You take care of this because it was seen as a check the box. Things have changed quite a bit. Adam says that Anthony Weiner getting caught sending r rated Twitter messages was actually a big boon to the company because it scared people enough into actually paying attention. That showed how you could ruin your career by acting badly on Twitter. I guess Trump is

demonstrating how you use Twitter to magnify a political message. Yeah, and after the wildest election in recent memory, President Trump is blowing up the playbook on how public officials talk to the people who elected them. Basically, he just ignores the careful Washingtonian way of speaking and cuts out the press in a new way. Here's what Adam had to say about that Twitter pierces that bubble. Twitter gives the opportunity to scalably have direct contact between candidates and voters,

elected officials and can ch once. We saw that develop over time, especially through the Obama years, and now I think we've seen a candidate in Donald Trump who is willing to really hit the accelerator and try to take that another step forward. Does Adam think that Twitter, what it has evolved into today lives up to the hopes he had for it when he started at the company. Yeah, I'll say this. Adam seemed genuinely optimistic about Twitter's role in politics, and he picked out a moment from this

campaign that he felt demonstrated Twitter's full potential. Now you might find this moment obscure. I didn't remember it, but but bear with me. It comes from November during the Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton is on stage with Bernie Sanders and she's asked to justify her close ties to Wall Street. I represented New York, and I represented New York on nine eleven when we were attacked. Where were we attacked. We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is.

I did spend a whole lot of time in effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York, it was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country. So oh, so, she's basically claiming that the Wall Street donations were essentially a thank you for helping rebuild after nine eleven. Yeah, as you can imagine, this triggered a ton of sarcastic

commentary on Twitter. I remember this. The CBS debate moderator spent the next commercial break sifting through Twitter looking at how viewers were reacting in real time to what Clinton was saying. Then they picked a tweet and put it up on the huge screen above the debate stage and asked Hillary Clinton to respond to the criticism. Here's Nancy Cordyce from CBS reading it out loud the Secretary Clinton.

One of the tweets we saw said this, I've never seen a candidate invoke nine eleven to justify millions of Wall Street donations until now, the idea being that, yes, you were a champion of the community after nine eleven, but what does that have to do with taking big donations. Well, I'm sorry that whoever tweeted that had that impress because after fifty years of televised presidential debates and people sitting at home yelling at the TV, for the first time

those yells were heard on stage. Um, that I think was the most profound moment of realization of the aspirations of my six years at Twitter. So Adam has essentially picked out this one articulate comment from what was probably a sea of acrimony, name calling, racism, sexism, all the rancid commentary that has stirred up on the service during these political moments. Still, it's difficult to disagree with him

on the power of this particular example. Yeah, I figured that if this was a big moment for Twitter, it must have been a really big moment for the person who actually put the tweet out. So I tracked him down his name is Andy gray Wall and he's a professor at the University of Iowa. At the time of the debate, he wasn't a very heavy Twitter user. He said, he was just kind of killing time until someone came to pick him up to go out. And at the

time he only had about two hundred followers. And I was having a good time and I never liked tweeted an event before. And about an hour in to the debate, I'm watching commercial break ends and they go ahead and putting my tweet on the screen that I just put up. You know, it's a very surreal moment. Since then, Greg Wall says that Twitter has turned into his primary source of information, and on the day I reached out to him, he was deeply involved in an esoteric Twitter debate over

Trump's conflicts of interests. So does Andy think Twitter as as important to the public discourse as Adam does? Uh? Not quite. He says he often ends up just being a place where people can yell at one another, and often not a lot gets done. But it's it's just hard to know the influence. I mean, when you spend all day on Twitter, you spend an hour on Twitter, and that becomes your whole world, and you think that

everyone's thinking about Twitter. And sometimes I'll spend a couple hours on Twitter and then I go play saw ball some firefighters or something, and no one cares or has any knowledge of what's been trending during the day, and you kind of remind yourself that Twitter, I think it's a bubble, but a very big one, um, but not as big as active users like me might think. I think this was a lot of people's experience with Twitter in two thousand sixteen. I like to call it the

Twitter paradox. One politician used it quite famously to run his entire presidential campaign, but at the same time, the network never felt so small and closed off from the real world. So the campaign seems to have taught us another lesson that a clever politician and its backers can use Twitter to dominate and even monopolize the public conversation. During the campaign, he would pick up his phone, type out a tweet, and bam, that's the news agenda for

the day. And he's certainly demonstrated pretty much every day since the election that that technique can work just as effectively in international affairs, legislative relations, and everything else. As it could for the daily horse race. Inside the most successful organizations, I T has gone from supporting the business to driving the business, but the costs of legacy infrastructure can impede this progress. Budgets can't stretch enough to pay

for digital innovation at the speed required. No one gets a blank check. The answer is to change the economics of your I by shifting from ownership to use, from licenses to subscriptions, from proprietary to open. Change the economics of it with open software from red hat. Learn more at red hat dot com. So this is creating a dilemma for the news media, especially now since Trump's tweets

are the official word of the United States. It seems like there's both a technological question here about how Twitter changes the way the president communicates with the public, and a political one about what this president actually says on Twitter. What's challenging about covering a President Trump because he uses Twitter a lot. He's putting things up that haven't been fact checked, that may not be true. Um, and can

you even tease those things apart? I mean, I think Donald Trump isn't the first politician to use social media or online media in general as an n run around conventional media. Um that at least journalists are familiar with. You know, journalists are now rather than being the gatekeepers of right information, they've taken on a role as more analyzers and investigators and less a sort of the primary

found of information. That's Ben Mullen, the managing editor of Pointer dot org pointers at Journalism Institute based in Florida. It also owns the Tampa Bay Times. We've been headed down this road for a while. So, but where Trump is different, I think is is that generally those channels have been used to communicate accurate information, and um, I don't think you've seen the same regard for accuracy or decorum as you've seen from other other political figures from

Donald Trump. And so I think the challenge becomes as the media, well, treat this information as um as you would any other record, you know, pars it, analyze it, fact check it, make sure it's accurate, and then sort of base your reporting from there. We should also know that Twitter has been an enormous asset for journalists. It's a great way to share and promote our stories, to communicate directly with sources, and to research people before you write about them. You can tell a lot about a

person from their Twitter feed if they're active. It's also a way that journalists keep up on what one another is doing, make sure they're not missing anything, and just stay involved in the conversation. One really good example of how Twitter is helpful for journalists comes from the campaign. It was the work of David Fahrenhold of the Washington Post. He's the reporter who showed that Trump wasn't telling the

truth when it came to his charitable giving. Fahrenhold got a lot of help from people who followed him on Twitter. He posted updates and what he was looking for, and other users helped him to track down the details. This is pretty much the idealistic version of Twitter, right, where social media empowers people by connecting them. It's the Twitter that Adam sharp SI's so. In other words, Josh, the

solution to Twitter's shortcomings are just more Twitter. Of course, that's a convenient view to have when you work at the company, and in any case, we see him on a one way road towards more social media, whether we like it or not. So I asked Molan about this. I'm wondering if you think that Trump is an outlier, and you know, is explainable only through the lens of Donald Trump, or if something like this was inevitable once social media started to become a real central way that

we communicate with one another. I think Donald Trump, to some extent is going to be regarded as a pioneer in this arena. I think you're probably going to see politicians both on the right and the left emulate his strategy. Maybe maybe not his specific rhetoric, but I think you are going to see politicians on both the left and the right be much more aggressive on social come Is that a bad thing or a good thing um? Or do we just not know yet? Oh, that's a hard question.

I think it's it's a bad thing for the public to get inaccurate information. I think it's a good thing for the public to have access to a multiplicity of sources of information which they can assess um independently. So I think, like everything in technology, the rise of Twitter and the rise of politicians using Twitter is neither a bad or a good thing. I think it's just a thing, and we all have to come to grips with it and figure out a way that it can be used responsibly.

There's a really odd thing about Twitter's role in politics that we haven't talked about yet. You would think the Twitter central role in public discourse would be great for business, but as anyone knows who follows it, Twitter as a company has really been struggling. Yeah, there's really no other way to see this. The company's revenue growth has slowed

to about eight percent last quarter. That's the ninth straight quarter the rate of growth has slowed, and that's especially an issue since the eleven year old company has never turned a profit. In the year leading up to the election, when Twitter was as prominent as it's ever been, it added about ten million monthly users. That amounts to about three percent growth over the same period. Facebook's user based grew by six and that's even though the company is

more than five and a half times Twitter size. At one point, Twitter tried to sell itself to another big company, but it didn't work out, and Trump's text summit really added insult to injury. Twitter didn't even get an invite. So, Josh, if number one user Donald Trump can't save Twitter, what's the problem here? I think there's a couple of things going on here. The first one is that when someone makes news with a tweet. A lot of people hear about it, but a lot of those people never actually

go to Twitter itself. They see the tweet on the news or being talked about somewhere else, and so they don't become users of the platform. And the other thing is, and I think in the news media we can appreciate this, is that you can be influential without being a lucrative business. Here's Adam Sharp again. I think in many ways Twitter faces the same challenges as the news industry, and that it is most successful in meeting it's ideals and aspirational

goals for meaningful impact. But making the connection between public good and shareholder value is a daily challenge, and that is no different for Twitter than it is for Bloomberg or the New York Times. Yeah, because you don't want to compare yourself the news industry generally, you would think that hearing about Twitter so much during the presidential campaign would have inspired a lot of people to try it out for the first time. I talked to Josh Ellman

about this. Elman was a product manager at Twitter from two thousand and nine to eleven. He also worked at Facebook, and he's now a partner at the venture firm Greylock Elman thinks Twitter's biggest problem is that it's intimidating to new users. That's because you have to spend a lot of time configuring it to give you useful information, choosing

which people to follow, and so on. Look of the people I know who use Twitter and and like when you've gotten it set up right for your life, with your passion, your interests, those unique things you care about and follow the right sources. Twitter is still the very best format for a lot of people to go get all that information. But it is really hard to set up, and it's really hard to find your passion. It's really hard to figure out who to follow and what to follow.

I call that tuning your Twitter, so to speak. And it's like Twitters hasn't made it any easier after all these years to tune your Twitter, and I really want them to and then they're the infamous trolls. The presidential campaign seemed to highlight the most hostile aspects of Twitter as a place to hang out online. Yeah, people who supported one candidate often sent threats and other nasty messages

to their political opponents. I know that many journalists with Jewish last names who criticized Trump ended up getting waves of messages suggesting they should be putting gas chambers. That's horrible. At the beginning of two thousand sixteen, Twitter said it was going to come up with ways to cut back on harassment and abuse, but a year later they're basically

making the same promises. Now. One thing that surprised me in my conversation with Adam It was how little he bought into the idea that Twitter has dropped the ball on this. Many people take that as a given, but he feels that politics has always had its nasty elements and the best way to deal with trolls is just to drown them out with more useful conversations. Were there any times during the campaign where you felt uncomfortable with

with Twitter's role in the in the political discourse. I think Twitter's role is to give everyone a voice, and Twitter's role and lyrale was not to have an opinion on which voice was right or wrong, or good or bad. That's for other people to decide, and I think we were successful in giving equal voice an opportunity. That's basically been the official line from all social media companies. Yeah, I think that that might be changing. It's worth saying

that Twitter's official stance on this is evolving. The company has been trying to come up with ways to cut off people who are just using the platform to abuse people. It seems to know that it really has to solve this one. Yeah, apparently the nasty tone on Twitter was one reason at a trouble finding another company to buy it. But even if the company does solve this, it may seem like an unwelcoming place too many people, so long as our politics remain so poisonous. Josh Elman thinks this

is still a big issue. I still believe that the potential of Twitter to be a billion niezer product when everybody gets a feed that matters to them, it's it's still there. Um, I feel like it's getting further away,

and I worry that there is some underlying dkay. You know, I think the real thing we should all be watching for is is does Twitter find any of its mojo where people start to feel like I'm proud to use Twitter or is it a little bit like I still feel kind of sad when I use Twitter because I see more of the abuse and a fewer people doing it, and and that ends up becoming sort of the meme, because you know, part of what makes these products powerful

is the cultural effect they have. To if Twitter loses some of that cultural energy, that ends up pretty tough. Do you think that it's a role in politics going forward? Then is going to end up being a big factor in that how people view it as is this a is this a product I want to get involved in or not? I don't know. Was a really tough year for politics and political discourse and a lot of antagonism

on both sides. I think if that continue us in our political discourse, then I think Twitter is going to be an unhappy place for a lot of people. They aren't going to want to continue to see that express in Twitter became such a busy place for that kind of negative expression. Um, if I'm optimistic that we kind of move on to a light, be more constructive political discourse this year, then that will be good for Twitter.

But you know it's fingers crossed now. That was supposed to be the end of this week's episode, but if anything, recording the show raised more questions for us than it answered. So Josh and I have been talking about this a lot offline, and we decided to tape one of our calls and added here. So, Josh, it's now been a couple of days since we recorded most of the podcast, and in that time, Donald Trump, of course, has been very active on Twitter. He attacked civil rights icon and

Congressman John Lewis. He said he was a man of no action. He of course attacked the media a few times and Saturday Night Live. You know, I just wonder Donald Trump is now president of the United States, do you think he continues to use Twitter and the way

that he has during the campaign and the transition. Yeah, this is a funny dynamic that I had in conversations I had for this podcast, but also over the last couple of months, where whoever I was talking to would say something along the lines of, once Donald Trump gets past this next milestone, he's gonna stop tweeting like that. If he became the Republican nominee, is gonna start acting presidential. He won the election, so he's going to calm down.

And last week I had people tell me, uh, you know, once once he's sworn in, I'm sure that he's gonna, you know, think a little bit more before he tweets. And I just don't see anything in his behavior that indicates that he would make that step. I mean, he hasn't done it at any of those past steps, you know, So somehow I'm a little more optimistic. Uh. You know, he's about to get a new Twitter account, the apt

potus account, thirteen million new followers. I feel like at some point there will have to be an intervention and we're going to see a little bit more distance between the president and the platform. Yeah. I wonder what that intervention looks like. Yeah, well, hopefully it's not a tweet insta getting a national emergency. But let me ask you this, So does Twitter survive the age of Trump? How do you think this company fares now? Given so much attention

is on it right now? Well, I wonder if within Twitter, if there's a sort of a die of release, thinking that maybe people will stop being so interested in politics. We're all tired the NFL playoffs they're starting, and we can focus on some of the other things twitters for. But I do think that there's some troubling signs for the company. You know, just last week they sold off fabric said it developed their tools to Google. I think people saw that as kind of a swimming down of

the company. Especially considering they've been losing some executive talent, and it really comes down to, you know, is this company going to have the resources and the energy to make what seemed like some pretty necessary adjustments. I'm reminded what Peter Thiel recently told Maureen Doubt in his interview in The New York Times. He said, the crazy thing is at a place like Twitter, they were all working for Trump this whole year, even though they thought they

were working for Bernie Sanders. I wonder how dismaying that is at a company like Twitter, where you have to assume the majority of the employees do lead and left. Yeah, I do think that it could be a problem for recruitment if Twitter continues to be seen as Trump's megaphone, considering how liberal Pilicon Valley is. I'll be something to watch. Well, thank you, josh Yeah, thank you, Rach. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Tell

us what you thought of this episode. Send a voice message to our producer Pia at p G A D K A r I at Bloomberg dot net, or write to me on Twitter. I'm at Joshua Brewstein and I'm at brad Stone. You can subscribe to decrypt it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating in a review. It helps more listeners to find our show. This episode was produced by p Ed gut, Cary Magnus Hendrickson, and Liz Smith. Alec McCabe as head

of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. Don't your legacy I systems cost you money, innovation and a place at the digital table of the future. You can change your systems and the economics of it with software from red Hat. See how at red hat dot com.