January 23, 2017 • 31 mins
We still don't know what Trump's presidency means for the broader tech industry, but one thing is clear: He loves Twitter. On the one hand, a president speaking directly with the people seems like a good thing. But will there be unintended consequences? This week, Bloomberg Technology's Brad Stone and Josh Brustein dig deep with two former Twitter employees, and also ask why a tool that's cemented its role in our public discourse is still struggling as a business.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Don't let your legacy I T 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. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me, I,
(00:20):
Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear h Donald John Trump,
do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute that I
will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,
the office of President of the United States. And we
now have a new president, Donald J. Trump. They're going
(00:43):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:27):
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,
(01:50):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:24):
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,
(04:45):
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,
(05:05):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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,
(06:14):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:12):
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
(10:32):
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,
(10:52):
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
(11:17):
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
(11:40):
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,
(12:01):
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.
(12:23):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:21):
successful organizations, I T has gone from supporting the business
to driving the business, but the costs of legacy infrastructure
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for digital innovation at the speed required. No one gets
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licenses to subscriptions, from proprietary to open. Change the economics
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at red hat dot com. So this is creating a
(15:10):
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.
(15:33):
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.
(15:57):
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.
(16:18):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:01):
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
(17:22):
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
(17:44):
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
(18:05):
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
(18:27):
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
(18:50):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:32):
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
(19:52):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:34):
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
(20:55):
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.
(21:16):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:02):
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,
(22:25):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:09):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:53):
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
(24:15):
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.
(24:38):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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
(25:41):
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.
(26:03):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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
(27:08):
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
(27:30):
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
(27:51):
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.
(28:12):
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
(28:35):
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.
(28:58):
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,
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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
(30:11):
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
(30:33):
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
(31:00):
legacy I systems cost you money, innovation and a place
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Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money,
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You can change your systems and the economics of it
with software from red hat see how at red hat
dot com. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me, I,
(00:20):
Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear h Donald John Trump,
do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute that I
will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States,
the office of President of the United States. And we
now have a new president, Donald J. Trump. They're going
(00:43):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:27):
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,
(01:50):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:24):
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,
(04:45):
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,
(05:05):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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,
(06:14):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:50):
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
(10:12):
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
(10:32):
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,
(10:52):
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
(11:17):
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
(11:40):
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,
(12:01):
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.
(12:23):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:21):
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at red hat dot com. So this is creating a
(15:10):
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.
(15:33):
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.
(15:57):
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.
(16:18):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:01):
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
(17:22):
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
(17:44):
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
(18:05):
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
(18:27):
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
(18:50):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:32):
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
(19:52):
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
(20:13):
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
(20:34):
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
(20:55):
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.
(21:16):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:02):
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,
(22:25):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:09):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:53):
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
(24:15):
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.
(24:38):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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
(25:41):
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.
(26:03):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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
(27:08):
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
(27:30):
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
(27:51):
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.
(28:12):
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
(28:35):
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.
(28:58):
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,
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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
(30:11):
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
(30:33):
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
(31:00):
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.
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