He doesn’t like invidious comparisons but he’s cool with being called an authoritarian.
“We need strength in this country,” he told me Friday morning, speaking from his Fifth Avenue office. “We have weak leadership. Hillary is pathetically weak.
.. Trump insisted that “the violence is not caused by me. It’s caused by agitators.” He added that “Hillary is the one disrupting my rallies. It’s more Hillary than Sanders, I found out.”
.. I wondered if he realized that, in riling up angry whites, he has pulled the scab off racism. “Obama, who is African-American, has done nothing for African Americans,” he replied.
.. He said he would soon unleash the moniker that he thought would diminish Hillary, the way “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” torched his Republican rivals; “I want to get rid of the leftovers first.”
.. Unable to resist, even though he knows I respect Kelly, he also described her to me as a “total whack job” with “no talent.”
.. Joe Scarborough said that just as F.D.R. was the master of radio and J.F.K. of television, D.J.T. is the titan of Twitter. The titan agreed, gloating about how his tweets to his seven million followers, sometimes penned in his jammies, become cable news bulletins. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll do them sometimes lying in bed.”
Not exactly a fireside chat. But it sure started a fire.
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Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions
But what if the best path for Twitter, as a service, is for Twitter the company to abandon that dream? What if becoming a $25 billion, $50 billion or $100 billion world-swallowing Internet giant just isn’t in the cards for a niche service like Twitter?
Perhaps there’s more promise in a future as an independent but private company; as a small and sustainable division of some larger tech or media conglomerate; or even as a venture that operates more like a nonprofit foundation.
.. Instead of aiming for something like Facebook, Twitter could mold itself on some other template for success. It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on donations, or a business like The New York Times Company, a publicly traded enterprise controlled by a family that has a preference for journalistic ambition.
.. But because Twitter is an accessible, real-time network that has become the nerve center of the world’s journalists, politicians, activists and agitants, it has, for better or worse, demonstrated an unrivaled capacity to influence real things in the real world.
Consider the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter or “Make America Great Again.”
“Twitter has created space for the amplification of the voice of marginalized people in ways that we have not seen before,” said DeRay McKesson, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. “It has redefined our understanding of the public sphere to be more inclusive and more accessible and to have substantive impact on real-world events.”
Twitter Steps Up Efforts to Thwart Terrorists’ Tweets
Twitter on Friday made clear that it was stepping up its fight to stem that tide. The social media company said it had suspended 125,000 Twitter accounts associated with extremism since the middle of 2015, the first time it has publicized the number of accounts it has suspended. Twitter also said it had expanded the teams that review reports of accounts connected to extremism, to remove the accounts more quickly.
.. The disclosure follows intensifying pressure on Twitter and other technology companies from the White House, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and government agencies to take more action to combat the digital practices of terrorist groups. The scrutiny has grown after mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., last year, because of concerns that radicalizations can be accelerated by extremist postings on the web and social media.
The Decay of Twitter
Ong’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media. His work catalogued the many differences between these two cultures: that orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.” In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic.
.. To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century.
.. “The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres where the collective ‘we’ treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims,” she writes.
.. In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation.
.. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations.
.. This tension also explains, to me, why the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi, but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh.
.. At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”