Twitter provides president positive vibes for negativity
Maureen Dowd
Donald Trump was profoundly affected by watching his older brother, Freddy, die from alcoholism at 43.
He proselytized against drinking and smoking, warning his kids away from those vices. Even with his casinos, Trump wasn’t a gambler, either, saying he’d rather own slot machines than play them.
And yet, in a strange twist, Trump has ended up an addict.
One of the more chilling things I’ve heard recently came from Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley founding father whose new book is “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.”
Lanier, who met Trump a couple of times back in the real estate developer’s New York heyday, thinks the president’s addiction to tweeting is rewiring his brain in a negative way. As Trump picks up speed on Twitter, the Oval Office is becoming a Skinner box. Like other “behavior modification empires,” as Lanier calls social media sites, Twitter offers positive reinforcement for negativity.
“Twitter addicts take on this kind of nervous, paranoid, cranky quality, sort of itching for a fight,” Lanier said in an interview. “Trump used to be in on his own joke, and he no longer is. He’s just striking out every morning, fishing for somebody to harass or seeing who’s harassing him.
“I do think it creates a terrifying situation because somebody who is addicted is easy to manipulate. It’s easier for the North Koreans to lie to him than if he wasn’t an addict.”
Launching a comeback, Twitter recast itself in a harsher light. The company, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo wrote, “tweaked its central feed to highlight virality, turning Twitter into a bruising barroom brawl featuring the most contentious political and cultural fights of the day.”
Manjoo told me: “Now when you log in, they show you the most interesting tweets you missed while you were away. They highlight the tweets of people arguing, the big news brawls of the day, as a way to engage the rest of the audience. That makes it a meaner place.”
This, even as Twitter — under pressure like the rest of Silicon Valley for letting the monsters get out of control — is developing “health metrics” to promote civility and communicate “more holistically.”
On its company blog, Twitter said it was inspired by Cortico, a nonprofit research organization that is trying to measure “conversational health” with four indicators: shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion and receptivity. Not exactly the attributes we see in Trump.
Michiko Kakutani writes in her new book, “The Death of Truth”: “Trump, of course, is a troll — both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling — the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path.”
Be best!
We have a president who is an addict running a country overflowing with opioid and social media addicts. His tweets propel the story on cable news and shape the narrative for reporters — who are addicted to the First Addict.
For Trump, who is also an attention addict, that is about as holistic as it’s going to get.