Make him melt to end meltdown
C’mon, Jack. You can do it.
Throw on some Kendrick Lamar. Pour yourself a big old glass of salt juice. Draw an ice bath and fire up the cryotherapy pod and the infrared sauna. Then pull the plug on him.
You could answer the existential question of whether realdonaldtrump exists if he doesn’t exist on Twitter. I tweet, therefore I am.
All it would take is one sweet click to force the greatest troll in the history of the internet to meet his maker. Maybe he disappears in an orange cloud of smoke, screaming, “I’m melllllllting.”
Do Trump — and the world — a favor and send him back into the void whence he came.
Our country is going through biological, economic and societal convulsions.
In Washington, the Trump administration’s deception about the virus was lethal. On Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, the fat cats who drained us dry and left us with no safety net profiteered off the virus. In Minneapolis, the death of George Floyd after a police officer knelt on him for almost nine minutes showed again that black Americans have everything to fear from some charged with protecting them.
As if that weren’t enough, we have to watch Donald Trump duke it out with the lords of the cloud to see who can destroy our democracy faster. Trump constantly torques up friction and cruelty, even as Twitter and Facebook refine their systems to ratchet up rage. It is amazing that a septuagenarian became the greatest exploiter of social media. Trump and Twitter were a match made in hell.
The Wall Street Journal had a chilling report a few days ago that Facebook’s own research in 2018 revealed that “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked,” Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
Mark Zuckerberg shelved the research.
“The shareholders of Facebook decided,
‘If you can increase my stock tenfold, we can put up with a lot of rage and hate,’” says Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
“These platforms have very dangerous profit motives. When you monetize rage at such an exponential rate, it’s bad for the world. These guys don’t look left or right; they just look down. They’re willing to promote white nationalism if there’s money in it. The rise of social media will be seen as directly correlating to the decline of Western civilization.”
Dorsey made some mild moves against the president who has been spewing lies and inciting violence on Twitter for years. He added footnotes clarifying false Trump tweets about mail-in ballots and put a warning label on the president’s tweet about the Minneapolis riots that echoes the language of a Miami police chief in 1967 and segregationist George Wallace: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Zuckerberg went on Fox to report that he was happy to continue enabling the Emperor of Chaos, noting that he did not think Facebook should be “the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”
Trump, furious that Dorsey would attempt to rein him in on the very platform that catapulted him into the White House, immediately decided to try to rein in Dorsey.
He signed an executive order that might strip liability protection from social media sites, which would mean they would have to more assiduously police false and defamatory posts. Galloway thinks that the removal of the Communications Decency Act makes a lot of sense, even if the president is doing it for the wrong reasons.
Trump does not seem to realize he’s removing his own protection. He huffs and puffs about freedom of speech when he really wants the freedom to be vile. If Twitter can be sued for what people say on it, how can Trump continue to torment?
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district encompasses Twitter, said it did little good for Dorsey to put up a few fact-checks while letting Trump’s rants about murder and other “misrepresentations” stay up.
“Facebook, all of them, they are all about making money,” the speaker said. “Their business model is to make money at the expense of the truth and the facts.” She crisply concluded that “all they want is to not pay taxes; they got their tax break in 2017,” and “they don’t want to be regulated, so they pander to the White House.”
C’mon, Jack. Make realdonaldtrump melt to help end our meltdown.