Speaker 1: Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money,
Speaker 1: innovation and a place at the digital table of the future.
Speaker 1: You can change your systems and the economics of it
Speaker 1: with software from red hat see how at red hat
Speaker 1: dot com. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me, I,
Speaker 1: Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear h Donald John Trump,
Speaker 1: do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute that I
Speaker 1: will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,
Speaker 1: the office of President of the United States. And we
Speaker 1: now have a new president, Donald J. Trump. They're going
Speaker 1: to be lots of fascinating tech storylines to watch over
Speaker 1: the next four years. Cybersecurity, the economic impacts of automation,
Speaker 1: the reinvigorated fight over net neutrality. But the thing that's
Speaker 1: going to be most visible to the general public, at
Speaker 1: least at first, is the way that the president communicates publicly. Ah. Yes,
Speaker 1: the infamous Trump Twitter account. And here's the thing. Trump
Speaker 1: tweets a lot. He uses the account at real Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: and since Friday afternoon he has controlled the official President
Speaker 1: of the United States account as well, that's at potus.
Speaker 1: For over a year, many people have been waiting with
Speaker 1: bated breath for that moment that shows how Trump's style
Speaker 1: of tweeting would become a political liability. It looked like
Speaker 1: we had gotten there a few times at least during
Speaker 1: the campaign, but but clearly it never came. I mean,
Speaker 1: he did win well. Just to remind us, Josh, what
Speaker 1: kind of messages are we talking about here, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: pulled a couple of examples to start with. Here's one
Speaker 1: from June, right when Trump started running druggies, drug dealers, rapists,
Speaker 1: and killers are coming across the southern border. When will
Speaker 1: the US get smart and stop this travesty? And here's
Speaker 1: one since Trump has been elected. China steals United States
Speaker 1: and Navy research drone in international waters, rips it out
Speaker 1: of water, and takes it to China in unprecedented act. Yes,
Speaker 1: he initially misspelled unprecedented, so it said unprecedented. And here's
Speaker 1: one more that got a lot of attention. In addition
Speaker 1: to winning the Electoral College in the landslide, I won
Speaker 1: the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people
Speaker 1: who voted illegally. Trump tweets nearly every day, so this
Speaker 1: is just a flavor of what he's posted. We pulled
Speaker 1: out these tweets in particular because they raise a few
Speaker 1: thorny issues. The one about Mexican immigrants, for example, raises
Speaker 1: all sorts of questions about presidential decorum. The tweet about
Speaker 1: China shows how a single message could put years of
Speaker 1: delicate diplomacy into jeopardy. And the last tweet, where Trump
Speaker 1: refers to quote millions of people who voted illegally, well,
Speaker 1: that raises difficult questions about fact checking the president. There's
Speaker 1: no evidence at all of widespread voter fraud, but millions
Speaker 1: of people we'll see tweets like this, Hi, I'm Brad
Speaker 1: Stone and I'm Joshua Boosting. This is our first episode
Speaker 1: of Decrypted since Donald Trump officially took office, so we're
Speaker 1: exploring the new president's feelings about technology and specifically his
Speaker 1: love for Twitter. Twitter was a major form of communication
Speaker 1: for Donald Trump the candidate, and even after winning the election,
Speaker 1: Trump kept setting the news agenda with his early morning tweets.
Speaker 1: Many people thought his tweeting would slow down after he won,
Speaker 1: but there's every indication that he plans to continue using
Speaker 1: it now that he's in office. Yeah, it's been controversial,
Speaker 1: to say the least. On the one hand, Twitter, let's
Speaker 1: Trump talk directly to voters, but as quick fire tweets,
Speaker 1: sometimes poorly thought out, have been aimed at everyone from
Speaker 1: union leaders in Indiana to the government of China to
Speaker 1: the media itself. It's creating a new paradigm for diplomats,
Speaker 1: journal us and of course, ordinary voters. We'll take a
Speaker 1: look at why Trump's use of Twitter marks such a
Speaker 1: break with the past, what this means for the press,
Speaker 1: and why despite all this attention, Twitter is still struggling
Speaker 1: to grow as a company. Here's one tricky problem. Some
Speaker 1: of Trump's tweets have probably violated Twitter's own rules against harassment.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post ran an op ed calling for Twitter
Speaker 1: to ban the president elect. Far hot Manjou, who writes
Speaker 1: a technology column for The New York Times, said the
Speaker 1: company would be within its rights to ban him, though
Speaker 1: he advised they shouldn't do it. Twitter has shut down
Speaker 1: a couple of people's accounts during this campaign. It's often
Speaker 1: been because they use the platform to attack other people personally. Now,
Speaker 1: Trump has a tendency to call people out by name himself,
Speaker 1: and when you're president of the United States, that carries
Speaker 1: a lot of weight. Here's a tweet that Trump posted
Speaker 1: in early December after he won the election. Chuck Jones,
Speaker 1: who is president of United steel Workers, has done a
Speaker 1: terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: there was the famous tweet from last summer directed at
Speaker 1: a former Miss Universe named Alicia Machado. Did crook and
Speaker 1: Hillary help disgusting check out sex tape and past Alicia
Speaker 1: m become a U S citizen so that she could
Speaker 1: use her in that debate. Now it doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: there actually was a sex tape, and Trump was criticized
Speaker 1: widely for this. Some Mexican currency traders recently said their
Speaker 1: government should just buy Twitter and shut it down because
Speaker 1: that would be cheaper than the negative impact of the
Speaker 1: president's hostile tweets have had on the value of the pace.
Speaker 1: So I think that last thing was a joke. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but maybe one of those jokes where you laugh as
Speaker 1: you say what you actually mean. Either way, it does
Speaker 1: make you think, what are the consequences of this shift
Speaker 1: in the way the President of the United States communicates
Speaker 1: with the world. Twitter started out with high ideals. On
Speaker 1: its website, it says this mission is to quote give
Speaker 1: everyone the power to create and air ideas and information
Speaker 1: instantly without barriers. Maybe they have succeeded it, although perhaps
Speaker 1: not quite in the way they initially imagined. I asked
Speaker 1: Twitter to discuss its role in politics and incoming Trump administration,
Speaker 1: but they said the subject was too sensitive. Luckily, the
Speaker 1: person who led Twitter as partnerships with government officials and
Speaker 1: politicians for the last six years actually left the company
Speaker 1: right after the election. Yeah. His name is Adam Sharp,
Speaker 1: and I gave him a call, and when I did so,
Speaker 1: he said he was hibernating in his house in Connecticut,
Speaker 1: kind of recovering from the election. But he did agree
Speaker 1: to let me come up and visit. I showed up
Speaker 1: on a frigid day in January, just a few weeks
Speaker 1: before the inauguration. Adam opened the door. He was wearing
Speaker 1: a striped collared shirt and it was tucked in even
Speaker 1: though he was in his own house and wasn't even
Speaker 1: wearing shoes. So more of a d C guy than
Speaker 1: a Silicon Valley guy. Yeah, it seemed that way. Before
Speaker 1: worked for Twitter, Adam was actually a staff around the
Speaker 1: Hill And when he talks about Twitter, you can hear
Speaker 1: him just layering the technology on top of his favorite
Speaker 1: Washington cliches. At the end of the day, politics is personal.
Speaker 1: It's like fee old. Typically, all politics is local. People
Speaker 1: want to have that ground level connection. The best way
Speaker 1: to get a vote is still what it was a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago, the handshake, the look in your eye.
Speaker 1: I'm running for office. Can I have your vote? It's
Speaker 1: hard to scale that to three million people. During his
Speaker 1: six years of Twitter, he's really seen the platform grow
Speaker 1: from nothing in the political world. Yeah, when Adam took
Speaker 1: over in two thousand and ten, only of people in
Speaker 1: Congress even had Twitter accounts. It was his job to
Speaker 1: go from door to door on the hill and show
Speaker 1: incoming lawmakers how the service even worked. Many offices that
Speaker 1: I would meet with in social media was something given
Speaker 1: to the junior most person. It was the new hire
Speaker 1: or the intern right out of school. Who you get
Speaker 1: all that social stuff? You take care of this because
Speaker 1: it was seen as a check the box. Things have
Speaker 1: changed quite a bit. Adam says that Anthony Weiner getting
Speaker 1: caught sending r rated Twitter messages was actually a big
Speaker 1: boon to the company because it scared people enough into
Speaker 1: actually paying attention. That showed how you could ruin your
Speaker 1: career by acting badly on Twitter. I guess Trump is
Speaker 1: demonstrating how you use Twitter to magnify a political message. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and after the wildest election in recent memory, President Trump
Speaker 1: is blowing up the playbook on how public officials talk
Speaker 1: to the people who elected them. Basically, he just ignores
Speaker 1: the careful Washingtonian way of speaking and cuts out the
Speaker 1: press in a new way. Here's what Adam had to
Speaker 1: say about that Twitter pierces that bubble. Twitter gives the
Speaker 1: opportunity to scalably have direct contact between candidates and voters,
Speaker 1: elected officials and can ch once. We saw that develop
Speaker 1: over time, especially through the Obama years, and now I
Speaker 1: think we've seen a candidate in Donald Trump who is
Speaker 1: willing to really hit the accelerator and try to take
Speaker 1: that another step forward. Does Adam think that Twitter, what
Speaker 1: it has evolved into today lives up to the hopes
Speaker 1: he had for it when he started at the company. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll say this. Adam seemed genuinely optimistic about Twitter's role
Speaker 1: in politics, and he picked out a moment from this
Speaker 1: campaign that he felt demonstrated Twitter's full potential. Now you
Speaker 1: might find this moment obscure. I didn't remember it, but
Speaker 1: but bear with me. It comes from November during the
Speaker 1: Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton is on stage with Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: and she's asked to justify her close ties to Wall Street.
Speaker 1: I represented New York, and I represented New York on
Speaker 1: nine eleven when we were attacked. Where were we attacked.
Speaker 1: We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is.
Speaker 1: I did spend a whole lot of time in effort
Speaker 1: helping them rebuild. That was good for New York, it
Speaker 1: was good for the economy, and it was a way
Speaker 1: to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country. So oh, so,
Speaker 1: she's basically claiming that the Wall Street donations were essentially
Speaker 1: a thank you for helping rebuild after nine eleven. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, this triggered a ton of sarcastic
Speaker 1: commentary on Twitter. I remember this. The CBS debate moderator
Speaker 1: spent the next commercial break sifting through Twitter looking at
Speaker 1: how viewers were reacting in real time to what Clinton
Speaker 1: was saying. Then they picked a tweet and put it
Speaker 1: up on the huge screen above the debate stage and
Speaker 1: asked Hillary Clinton to respond to the criticism. Here's Nancy
Speaker 1: Cordyce from CBS reading it out loud the Secretary Clinton.
Speaker 1: One of the tweets we saw said this, I've never
Speaker 1: seen a candidate invoke nine eleven to justify millions of
Speaker 1: Wall Street donations until now, the idea being that, yes,
Speaker 1: you were a champion of the community after nine eleven,
Speaker 1: but what does that have to do with taking big donations. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry that whoever tweeted that had that impress because
Speaker 1: after fifty years of televised presidential debates and people sitting
Speaker 1: at home yelling at the TV, for the first time
Speaker 1: those yells were heard on stage. Um, that I think
Speaker 1: was the most profound moment of realization of the aspirations
Speaker 1: of my six years at Twitter. So Adam has essentially
Speaker 1: picked out this one articulate comment from what was probably
Speaker 1: a sea of acrimony, name calling, racism, sexism, all the
Speaker 1: rancid commentary that has stirred up on the service during
Speaker 1: these political moments. Still, it's difficult to disagree with him
Speaker 1: on the power of this particular example. Yeah, I figured
Speaker 1: that if this was a big moment for Twitter, it
Speaker 1: must have been a really big moment for the person
Speaker 1: who actually put the tweet out. So I tracked him
Speaker 1: down his name is Andy gray Wall and he's a
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Iowa. At the time of
Speaker 1: the debate, he wasn't a very heavy Twitter user. He said,
Speaker 1: he was just kind of killing time until someone came
Speaker 1: to pick him up to go out. And at the
Speaker 1: time he only had about two hundred followers. And I
Speaker 1: was having a good time and I never liked tweeted
Speaker 1: an event before. And about an hour in to the debate,
Speaker 1: I'm watching commercial break ends and they go ahead and
Speaker 1: putting my tweet on the screen that I just put up.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a very surreal moment. Since then, Greg
Speaker 1: Wall says that Twitter has turned into his primary source
Speaker 1: of information, and on the day I reached out to him,
Speaker 1: he was deeply involved in an esoteric Twitter debate over
Speaker 1: Trump's conflicts of interests. So does Andy think Twitter as
Speaker 1: as important to the public discourse as Adam does? Uh?
Speaker 1: Not quite. He says he often ends up just being
Speaker 1: a place where people can yell at one another, and
Speaker 1: often not a lot gets done. But it's it's just
Speaker 1: hard to know the influence. I mean, when you spend
Speaker 1: all day on Twitter, you spend an hour on Twitter,
Speaker 1: and that becomes your whole world, and you think that
Speaker 1: everyone's thinking about Twitter. And sometimes I'll spend a couple
Speaker 1: hours on Twitter and then I go play saw ball
Speaker 1: some firefighters or something, and no one cares or has
Speaker 1: any knowledge of what's been trending during the day, and
Speaker 1: you kind of remind yourself that Twitter, I think it's
Speaker 1: a bubble, but a very big one, um, but not
Speaker 1: as big as active users like me might think. I
Speaker 1: think this was a lot of people's experience with Twitter
Speaker 1: in two thousand sixteen. I like to call it the
Speaker 1: Twitter paradox. One politician used it quite famously to run
Speaker 1: his entire presidential campaign, but at the same time, the
Speaker 1: network never felt so small and closed off from the
Speaker 1: real world. So the campaign seems to have taught us
Speaker 1: another lesson that a clever politician and its backers can
Speaker 1: use Twitter to dominate and even monopolize the public conversation.
Speaker 1: During the campaign, he would pick up his phone, type
Speaker 1: out a tweet, and bam, that's the news agenda for
Speaker 1: the day. And he's certainly demonstrated pretty much every day
Speaker 1: since the election that that technique can work just as
Speaker 1: effectively in international affairs, legislative relations, and everything else. As
Speaker 1: it could for the daily horse race. Inside the most
Speaker 1: successful organizations, I T has gone from supporting the business
Speaker 1: to driving the business, but the costs of legacy infrastructure
Speaker 1: can impede this progress. Budgets can't stretch enough to pay
Speaker 1: for digital innovation at the speed required. No one gets
Speaker 1: a blank check. The answer is to change the economics
Speaker 1: of your I by shifting from ownership to use, from
Speaker 1: licenses to subscriptions, from proprietary to open. Change the economics
Speaker 1: of it with open software from red hat. Learn more
Speaker 1: at red hat dot com. So this is creating a
Speaker 1: dilemma for the news media, especially now since Trump's tweets
Speaker 1: are the official word of the United States. It seems
Speaker 1: like there's both a technological question here about how Twitter
Speaker 1: changes the way the president communicates with the public, and
Speaker 1: a political one about what this president actually says on Twitter.
Speaker 1: What's challenging about covering a President Trump because he uses
Speaker 1: Twitter a lot. He's putting things up that haven't been
Speaker 1: fact checked, that may not be true. Um, and can
Speaker 1: you even tease those things apart? I mean, I think
Speaker 1: Donald Trump isn't the first politician to use social media
Speaker 1: or online media in general as an n run around
Speaker 1: conventional media. Um that at least journalists are familiar with.
Speaker 1: You know, journalists are now rather than being the gatekeepers
Speaker 1: of right information, they've taken on a role as more
Speaker 1: analyzers and investigators and less a sort of the primary
Speaker 1: found of information. That's Ben Mullen, the managing editor of
Speaker 1: Pointer dot org pointers at Journalism Institute based in Florida.
Speaker 1: It also owns the Tampa Bay Times. We've been headed
Speaker 1: down this road for a while. So, but where Trump
Speaker 1: is different, I think is is that generally those channels
Speaker 1: have been used to communicate accurate information, and um, I
Speaker 1: don't think you've seen the same regard for accuracy or
Speaker 1: decorum as you've seen from other other political figures from
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. And so I think the challenge becomes as
Speaker 1: the media, well, treat this information as um as you
Speaker 1: would any other record, you know, pars it, analyze it,
Speaker 1: fact check it, make sure it's accurate, and then sort
Speaker 1: of base your reporting from there. We should also know
Speaker 1: that Twitter has been an enormous asset for journalists. It's
Speaker 1: a great way to share and promote our stories, to
Speaker 1: communicate directly with sources, and to research people before you
Speaker 1: write about them. You can tell a lot about a
Speaker 1: person from their Twitter feed if they're active. It's also
Speaker 1: a way that journalists keep up on what one another
Speaker 1: is doing, make sure they're not missing anything, and just
Speaker 1: stay involved in the conversation. One really good example of
Speaker 1: how Twitter is helpful for journalists comes from the campaign.
Speaker 1: It was the work of David Fahrenhold of the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: He's the reporter who showed that Trump wasn't telling the
Speaker 1: truth when it came to his charitable giving. Fahrenhold got
Speaker 1: a lot of help from people who followed him on Twitter.
Speaker 1: He posted updates and what he was looking for, and
Speaker 1: other users helped him to track down the details. This
Speaker 1: is pretty much the idealistic version of Twitter, right, where
Speaker 1: social media empowers people by connecting them. It's the Twitter
Speaker 1: that Adam sharp SI's so. In other words, Josh, the
Speaker 1: solution to Twitter's shortcomings are just more Twitter. Of course,
Speaker 1: that's a convenient view to have when you work at
Speaker 1: the company, and in any case, we see him on
Speaker 1: a one way road towards more social media, whether we
Speaker 1: like it or not. So I asked Molan about this.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you think that Trump is an outlier,
Speaker 1: and you know, is explainable only through the lens of
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, or if something like this was inevitable once
Speaker 1: social media started to become a real central way that
Speaker 1: we communicate with one another. I think Donald Trump, to
Speaker 1: some extent is going to be regarded as a pioneer
Speaker 1: in this arena. I think you're probably going to see
Speaker 1: politicians both on the right and the left emulate his strategy.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe not his specific rhetoric, but I think you
Speaker 1: are going to see politicians on both the left and
Speaker 1: the right be much more aggressive on social come Is
Speaker 1: that a bad thing or a good thing um? Or
Speaker 1: do we just not know yet? Oh, that's a hard question.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's a bad thing for the public
Speaker 1: to get inaccurate information. I think it's a good thing
Speaker 1: for the public to have access to a multiplicity of
Speaker 1: sources of information which they can assess um independently. So
Speaker 1: I think, like everything in technology, the rise of Twitter
Speaker 1: and the rise of politicians using Twitter is neither a
Speaker 1: bad or a good thing. I think it's just a thing,
Speaker 1: and we all have to come to grips with it
Speaker 1: and figure out a way that it can be used responsibly.
Speaker 1: There's a really odd thing about Twitter's role in politics
Speaker 1: that we haven't talked about yet. You would think the
Speaker 1: Twitter central role in public discourse would be great for business,
Speaker 1: but as anyone knows who follows it, Twitter as a
Speaker 1: company has really been struggling. Yeah, there's really no other
Speaker 1: way to see this. The company's revenue growth has slowed
Speaker 1: to about eight percent last quarter. That's the ninth straight
Speaker 1: quarter the rate of growth has slowed, and that's especially
Speaker 1: an issue since the eleven year old company has never
Speaker 1: turned a profit. In the year leading up to the election,
Speaker 1: when Twitter was as prominent as it's ever been, it
Speaker 1: added about ten million monthly users. That amounts to about
Speaker 1: three percent growth over the same period. Facebook's user based
Speaker 1: grew by six and that's even though the company is
Speaker 1: more than five and a half times Twitter size. At
Speaker 1: one point, Twitter tried to sell itself to another big company,
Speaker 1: but it didn't work out, and Trump's text summit really
Speaker 1: added insult to injury. Twitter didn't even get an invite. So, Josh,
Speaker 1: if number one user Donald Trump can't save Twitter, what's
Speaker 1: the problem here? I think there's a couple of things
Speaker 1: going on here. The first one is that when someone
Speaker 1: makes news with a tweet. A lot of people hear
Speaker 1: about it, but a lot of those people never actually
Speaker 1: go to Twitter itself. They see the tweet on the
Speaker 1: news or being talked about somewhere else, and so they
Speaker 1: don't become users of the platform. And the other thing is,
Speaker 1: and I think in the news media we can appreciate this,
Speaker 1: is that you can be influential without being a lucrative business.
Speaker 1: Here's Adam Sharp again. I think in many ways Twitter
Speaker 1: faces the same challenges as the news industry, and that
Speaker 1: it is most successful in meeting it's ideals and aspirational
Speaker 1: goals for meaningful impact. But making the connection between public
Speaker 1: good and shareholder value is a daily challenge, and that
Speaker 1: is no different for Twitter than it is for Bloomberg
Speaker 1: or the New York Times. Yeah, because you don't want
Speaker 1: to compare yourself the news industry generally, you would think
Speaker 1: that hearing about Twitter so much during the presidential campaign
Speaker 1: would have inspired a lot of people to try it
Speaker 1: out for the first time. I talked to Josh Ellman
Speaker 1: about this. Elman was a product manager at Twitter from
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine to eleven. He also worked at Facebook,
Speaker 1: and he's now a partner at the venture firm Greylock
Speaker 1: Elman thinks Twitter's biggest problem is that it's intimidating to
Speaker 1: new users. That's because you have to spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time configuring it to give you useful information, choosing
Speaker 1: which people to follow, and so on. Look of the
Speaker 1: people I know who use Twitter and and like when
Speaker 1: you've gotten it set up right for your life, with
Speaker 1: your passion, your interests, those unique things you care about
Speaker 1: and follow the right sources. Twitter is still the very
Speaker 1: best format for a lot of people to go get
Speaker 1: all that information. But it is really hard to set up,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to find your passion. It's really
Speaker 1: hard to figure out who to follow and what to follow.
Speaker 1: I call that tuning your Twitter, so to speak. And
Speaker 1: it's like Twitters hasn't made it any easier after all
Speaker 1: these years to tune your Twitter, and I really want
Speaker 1: them to and then they're the infamous trolls. The presidential
Speaker 1: campaign seemed to highlight the most hostile aspects of Twitter
Speaker 1: as a place to hang out online. Yeah, people who
Speaker 1: supported one candidate often sent threats and other nasty messages
Speaker 1: to their political opponents. I know that many journalists with
Speaker 1: Jewish last names who criticized Trump ended up getting waves
Speaker 1: of messages suggesting they should be putting gas chambers. That's horrible.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of two thousand sixteen, Twitter said it
Speaker 1: was going to come up with ways to cut back
Speaker 1: on harassment and abuse, but a year later they're basically
Speaker 1: making the same promises. Now. One thing that surprised me
Speaker 1: in my conversation with Adam It was how little he
Speaker 1: bought into the idea that Twitter has dropped the ball
Speaker 1: on this. Many people take that as a given, but
Speaker 1: he feels that politics has always had its nasty elements
Speaker 1: and the best way to deal with trolls is just
Speaker 1: to drown them out with more useful conversations. Were there
Speaker 1: any times during the campaign where you felt uncomfortable with
Speaker 1: with Twitter's role in the in the political discourse. I
Speaker 1: think Twitter's role is to give everyone a voice, and
Speaker 1: Twitter's role and lyrale was not to have an opinion
Speaker 1: on which voice was right or wrong, or good or bad.
Speaker 1: That's for other people to decide, and I think we
Speaker 1: were successful in giving equal voice an opportunity. That's basically
Speaker 1: been the official line from all social media companies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that might be changing. It's worth saying
Speaker 1: that Twitter's official stance on this is evolving. The company
Speaker 1: has been trying to come up with ways to cut
Speaker 1: off people who are just using the platform to abuse people.
Speaker 1: It seems to know that it really has to solve
Speaker 1: this one. Yeah, apparently the nasty tone on Twitter was
Speaker 1: one reason at a trouble finding another company to buy it.
Speaker 1: But even if the company does solve this, it may
Speaker 1: seem like an unwelcoming place too many people, so long
Speaker 1: as our politics remain so poisonous. Josh Elman thinks this
Speaker 1: is still a big issue. I still believe that the
Speaker 1: potential of Twitter to be a billion niezer product when
Speaker 1: everybody gets a feed that matters to them, it's it's
Speaker 1: still there. Um, I feel like it's getting further away,
Speaker 1: and I worry that there is some underlying dkay. You know,
Speaker 1: I think the real thing we should all be watching
Speaker 1: for is is does Twitter find any of its mojo
Speaker 1: where people start to feel like I'm proud to use
Speaker 1: Twitter or is it a little bit like I still
Speaker 1: feel kind of sad when I use Twitter because I
Speaker 1: see more of the abuse and a fewer people doing it,
Speaker 1: and and that ends up becoming sort of the meme,
Speaker 1: because you know, part of what makes these products powerful
Speaker 1: is the cultural effect they have. To if Twitter loses
Speaker 1: some of that cultural energy, that ends up pretty tough.
Speaker 1: Do you think that it's a role in politics going forward?
Speaker 1: Then is going to end up being a big factor
Speaker 1: in that how people view it as is this a
Speaker 1: is this a product I want to get involved in
Speaker 1: or not? I don't know. Was a really tough year
Speaker 1: for politics and political discourse and a lot of antagonism
Speaker 1: on both sides. I think if that continue us in
Speaker 1: our political discourse, then I think Twitter is going to
Speaker 1: be an unhappy place for a lot of people. They
Speaker 1: aren't going to want to continue to see that express
Speaker 1: in Twitter became such a busy place for that kind
Speaker 1: of negative expression. Um, if I'm optimistic that we kind
Speaker 1: of move on to a light, be more constructive political
Speaker 1: discourse this year, then that will be good for Twitter.
Speaker 1: But you know it's fingers crossed now. That was supposed
Speaker 1: to be the end of this week's episode, but if anything,
Speaker 1: recording the show raised more questions for us than it answered.
Speaker 1: So Josh and I have been talking about this a
Speaker 1: lot offline, and we decided to tape one of our
Speaker 1: calls and added here. So, Josh, it's now been a
Speaker 1: couple of days since we recorded most of the podcast,
Speaker 1: and in that time, Donald Trump, of course, has been
Speaker 1: very active on Twitter. He attacked civil rights icon and
Speaker 1: Congressman John Lewis. He said he was a man of
Speaker 1: no action. He of course attacked the media a few
Speaker 1: times and Saturday Night Live. You know, I just wonder
Speaker 1: Donald Trump is now president of the United States, do
Speaker 1: you think he continues to use Twitter and the way
Speaker 1: that he has during the campaign and the transition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a funny dynamic that I had in conversations
Speaker 1: I had for this podcast, but also over the last
Speaker 1: couple of months, where whoever I was talking to would
Speaker 1: say something along the lines of, once Donald Trump gets
Speaker 1: past this next milestone, he's gonna stop tweeting like that.
Speaker 1: If he became the Republican nominee, is gonna start acting presidential.
Speaker 1: He won the election, so he's going to calm down.
Speaker 1: And last week I had people tell me, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: once once he's sworn in, I'm sure that he's gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, think a little bit more before he tweets.
Speaker 1: And I just don't see anything in his behavior that
Speaker 1: indicates that he would make that step. I mean, he
Speaker 1: hasn't done it at any of those past steps, you know,
Speaker 1: So somehow I'm a little more optimistic. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: he's about to get a new Twitter account, the apt
Speaker 1: potus account, thirteen million new followers. I feel like at
Speaker 1: some point there will have to be an intervention and
Speaker 1: we're going to see a little bit more distance between
Speaker 1: the president and the platform. Yeah. I wonder what that
Speaker 1: intervention looks like. Yeah, well, hopefully it's not a tweet
Speaker 1: insta getting a national emergency. But let me ask you this,
Speaker 1: So does Twitter survive the age of Trump? How do
Speaker 1: you think this company fares now? Given so much attention
Speaker 1: is on it right now? Well, I wonder if within Twitter,
Speaker 1: if there's a sort of a die of release, thinking
Speaker 1: that maybe people will stop being so interested in politics.
Speaker 1: We're all tired the NFL playoffs they're starting, and we
Speaker 1: can focus on some of the other things twitters for.
Speaker 1: But I do think that there's some troubling signs for
Speaker 1: the company. You know, just last week they sold off
Speaker 1: fabric said it developed their tools to Google. I think
Speaker 1: people saw that as kind of a swimming down of
Speaker 1: the company. Especially considering they've been losing some executive talent,
Speaker 1: and it really comes down to, you know, is this
Speaker 1: company going to have the resources and the energy to
Speaker 1: make what seemed like some pretty necessary adjustments. I'm reminded
Speaker 1: what Peter Thiel recently told Maureen Doubt in his interview
Speaker 1: in The New York Times. He said, the crazy thing
Speaker 1: is at a place like Twitter, they were all working
Speaker 1: for Trump this whole year, even though they thought they
Speaker 1: were working for Bernie Sanders. I wonder how dismaying that
Speaker 1: is at a company like Twitter, where you have to
Speaker 1: assume the majority of the employees do lead and left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do think that it could be a problem for
Speaker 1: recruitment if Twitter continues to be seen as Trump's megaphone,
Speaker 1: considering how liberal Pilicon Valley is. I'll be something to watch. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you, josh Yeah, thank you, Rach. And that's it
Speaker 1: for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Tell
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Speaker 1: message to our producer Pia at p G A D
Speaker 1: K A r I at Bloomberg dot net, or write
Speaker 1: to me on Twitter. I'm at Joshua Brewstein and I'm
Speaker 1: at brad Stone. You can subscribe to decrypt it on
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Speaker 1: find our show. This episode was produced by p Ed gut,
Speaker 1: Cary Magnus Hendrickson, and Liz Smith. Alec McCabe as head
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. Don't your
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