Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, doesn’t get how Twitter works. He thinks the technology is biased against him. Look: if you don’t know how to use a tool properly, own up to it and get help. Don’t flail around blaming technology for your own ignorance. Giuliani tweeted this: Mueller filed an indictment just as the…
Late last night, Donald Trump threatened Iran with an all-caps tweet. Today, I’ll analyze its effectiveness using the Without Bullshit rubric for all written communication, ROAM. Here’s Trump’s tweet: To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED…
Twitter screwed up and wrote everybody’s passwords to a file in plaintext. Then (of course) they apologized. Can we do better with these apologies? And what’s the fallout from this incident? Here’s an analysis and a conversation with Crisis Communication expert Melissa Agnes, author of Crisis Ready. This is getting routine. And that’s the problem. At…
Jack Dorsey posted a tweetstorm about what’s wrong with Twitter and how the company will start to fix it. It’s too late, and probably too little, but it’s a start. Here’s what he posted: We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable…
Many of us who promoted social media when it was young are now wondering if we made a mistake. For example, former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has said “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.” So I decided to take a look…
Randi Zuckerberg says she was harassed by another passenger on Alaska Airlines, and the flight crew enabled him. She tweeted about it to get the airline’s attention. Is it fair to use your social media following to get satisfaction from a company behaving poorly? Was Randi Zuckerberg’s letter fair? Randi Zuckerberg is an author, Facebook’s…
You know everything there is to know about how Donald Trump thinks and acts. You want your government to be transparent? You got it. His every utterance get blanket coverage on cable from MSNBC to Fox News, and everything between. We have Politico, Talking Points Memo, and Breitbart dissecting his burps and asides, magnified by…
President Trump tweets lots of spelling errors. In the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo says this is just a sign of the times. It’s fine to spell things however you want on social media your friends, but when you’re communicating with people who matter — like, say, the entire citizenry of the United States —…
Brianna Wu is running for Congress. She’s using Twitter like a real person. The result is an authenticity and humanity that’s unique in the political sphere. Yesterday I explained to a Twitter idealist from a decade ago how political Twitter had succeeded, but not in the way any of us expected. Now every politician has…