Trump tantrums put Twitter under strain
new york — US President Donald Trump’s tweets generate such a massive public engagement and responses that Twitter cannot handle them, putting a tremendous pressure on Twitter’s system.
According to a report in Mashable India on Saturday, many users’ replies to Trump’s tweets appeared as ‘disconnected’ from the original tweet, as the massive responses it garners caused a breakdown of Twitter’s technical infrastructure.
Some people have called the issue a matter of censorship but Twitter’s vice-president of engineering, Ed Ho, has clarified that the ‘disconnection’ between original Trump tweet and replies was caused by a “long standing technical issue”. —
Our legal system is broken! 77% of refugees allowed into US since travel reprieve hail from seven suspect countries. (WT) SO DANGEROUS! Donald Trump US President
new york — The revolution may not be televised — but it apparently will be tweeted. And Facebooked. And Instagrammed.
Not long after President Donald Trump temporarily barred most people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US, social activist Dex Torricke-Barton took to Facebook. “I’m thinking of organising a rally,” he posted. Within a few hours, more than 1,000 people expressed interest. The resulting protest a week later, in front of San Francisco’s City Hall, drew thousands more.
Torricke-Barton is far from alone. From organising protests on the fly to raising money for refugee and immigrant rights groups, people have been using social media to fuel the resistance against Trump in ways their organising predecessors from the 1960s could have hardly imagined.
In Queens, New York, for instance, a group of 27 women met up to write postcards to their state and local representatives during a “Postcard-Writing Happy Hour” organized through Facebook.
And on Ravelry, the social network for knitters and crocheters, members have been trading advice and knitting patterns for the pink “pussy hats” that emerged as a symbol during the Women’s March on Washington and similar protests elsewhere after Trump’s inauguration.
“This is an incredible project because it’s mixed between digital and physical,” says Jayna Zweiman, one of the founders of the Pussyhat Project. “We harnessed social media for good.”
In 1969, activists planned massive marches around the US to protests the war in Vietnam. The protests, called the Moratorium, drew millions of people around the world. But “it took months, a lot of effort, a national office of the organisation to get it off the ground,” says Christopher Huff, a Beacon College professor focused on social movements of the 1960s. “The women’s march was achieved at a much larger scale at a fraction of the time.”
This immediacy is both an asset and a disadvantage. While online networks help people rally quickly around a cause, Huff says, they don’t necessarily help people grasp the “long-term effort” required to sustain a movement.
In Silicon Valley and across the tech world, Trump’s travel ban created a stir that went well beyond the industry’s usual calls for deregulation and more coding classes for kids. Between aggregating donations, issuing fiery statements, and walking out of work in protest, tech company executives and employees took up the anti-Trump cause at a scale not seen in other industries.
New York-based Meetup, for instance, broke with nearly 15 years of helping people form and join interest groups on a non-partisan basis. “We’re vital plumbing for democracy,” the company wrote in a Medium post this week. “But after Donald Trump’s order to block people on the basis of nationality and religion, a line had been crossed.”
So Meetup held a companywide “resist-a-thon” — a riff on the hackathons tech companies hold to devise new technologies — to help people get involved in the anti-Trump movement known as “the resistance.” It then unveiled more than 1,000 new “(hash)resist” Meetup groups that people can join for free (it’s normally $15 a month to run a group). As of Wednesday, some 35,000 people had joined the (hash)resist Meetup groups, and scheduled 625 events around the world.
Torricke-Barton, who in earlier incarnations wrote speeches for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt, said he and two sisters of Iranian descent organised their last-minute protest using Facebook groups and Messenger. That’s quite a contrast with Torricke-Barton’s earlier experience protesting violence in Darfur more than a decade ago.
Back then, “lawyers, marketers, communications people would help you get (the protests) off the ground ... networks had to be created in advance,” he said. “Now, protests can start without any kind of infrastructure.” Shortly after Trump’s order, the venture capitalist Bijan Sabet tweeted a link to the fundraising platform Crowdrise alongside an explanation of his support for the American Civil Liberties Union— and then asked his followers to do the same.
Sabet figured it might take as long as two months to reach his $50,000 goal. It took three days. That weekend, the ACLU raised $24 million. —