A Twitter architect shifts stance on Trump’s rights
I’m claiming the screen credit on this right now. When the dramatization of President Donald Trump’s downfall is inevitably filmed, the tension won’t build to when he is impeached (or when he is impeached again) but to when he drops to his knees in despair upon realizing he has been blocked from tweeting.
That scream was absolutely longer than 280 characters.
Stamford’s Adam Sharp, who was Twitter’s first head of news, government and elections, has long defended Trump’s right to tweet, and the platform’s resistance to stifling him.
Like so many other things in America, Sharp’s opinion tilted on Jan. 6.
“When I saw the first shot of a rioter sitting in the presiding chair of the Senate chamber, that broke me,” Sharp says. “I just collapsed sobbing.”
Before the Twitter gig from 2010 through 2016, Sharp was deputy chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-Louisiana. These days, he is president and CEO of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, overseeing the Emmy Awards for news and documentary, sports and daytime TV.
“I certainly picked an interesting time to be in the large public gatherings business,” he jests of his duties during the pandemic.
When I tease Sharp that his professional turns live up to his name, he owns up to having “career ADD.” While working from his Shippan home, the self-proclaimed “geek” has been building a massive model of the Supreme Court building brick by Lego brick (made even more impressive given Lego doesn’t make a kit of it).
As an architect of the platform that changed the way an American president communicates, he has developed a thesis that should be a mandatory lesson in any college media course.
I can’t condense it to a Tweet (I doubt Sharp could either), but the brief version is that during Colonial times politics came down to the retail transaction of a handshake and a look square in the eye. The Industrial Revolution broadened communication, and broadcasting shifted the pendulum from retail to wholesale.
“What I found remarkable about Twitter was you had the ability to have that retail connection at a broadcast scale,” Sharp says.
Under his watch, Twitter closed the space between candidate and voter. Voters favored candidates they believed were writing their own tweets.
Donald Trump seized that. In the Twitterverse, he became the voice of authenticity. In Sharp’s words, he nurtured a feeling with supporters that they had “a direct connection to the president of the United States.”
For Sharp, clarity came when he was in Iowa in 2016 asking a woman about candidates.
“They’re all liars,” she replied.
He asked about Hillary Clinton.
“Liar!” she insisted, reciting from the boilerplate list of reasons.
He asked about Trump.
“Liar!”
Sharp challenged her to choose. She didn’t hesitate to name Trump. Sharp reached back to his first career in broadcasting to ask any journalist’s most potent question.
“Why?”
“Because when Donald Trump lies, he lies from the heart.”
Authenticity.
It was a demonstration of the power Sharp always felt Twitter had the potential to wield.
He pauses to clarify.
“I don’t think he used that power for good,” he says in staccato pace worthy of William Shatner reading from the Constitution (“We ... the ... people) on “Star Trek.”
Sharp reasons that he and his former colleagues can’t be held accountable for not having the foresight to craft policies in the event Twitter was abused by handles with the most followers, such as the president, the pope, or Lady Gaga.
“You can’t blame anyone for not saying ‘What if the president does (something like inciting riots)?’ Because for centuries in American history that was unthinkable.”
Sharp has been steadfast since he left Twitter four years ago in saying the company was right not to fold to public pressure to shutter Trump’s account.
His logic is seasoned with the wisdom of being the son of a journalist and having married one. ABC and CBS reporter Roger Sharp died in 1986, when Adam was 8 years old and attending Greenwich Country Day School.
“Why should a private company whitewash the public record?” Sharp reasons.
It would be akin to editing speeches to make the president appear “like a master of oratory,” he continues.
I offer my Twitter-worthy consensus: Let it burn. “So you can have this madman with his finger on the button, but to the masses, you would just paint this picture of a president who is completely balanced? That never seemed to make sense to me.”
He has a second reason.
“The president is exceptional.”
Again, he clarifies.
“Meaning one deserving of exception. Not of greatness.”
So when Trump threatened foreign nations, it was different because a president is allowed to under the law (unlike the rest of us).
“By the same token the Constitution is specific: If there is one person who should keep his hands off Congress, it is the president.”
And that’s why Sharp ultimately sided with booting Trump from Twitterland.
The line had been crossed. I reject submissions all the time from people who incorrectly translate “free speech” to “anything goes.” These decisions are seldom easy. Twitter did the right thing at the right time, though for traditional journalists, it feels like Bruce Willis in “Die Hard” bellowing “Welcome to the party, pal” at the latecomer.
In my script, President Joe Biden sits behind his desk for the first time, looks through a splintered screen at a Twitter page, puts his fingers on the keyboard as he ponders a message, then closes the browser and gets to work.