The Donald could shape dialogue of pols, public
Brennan White, CEO of Cortex, a Boston-based company that offers “artificial intelligence for content,” helping clients optimize the timing and content of their tweets for maximum effect, said President-elect Donald Trump has both a big opportunity and big risks ahead of him if he keeps using social media as president:
“To me, the fact that he was the first one to kind of have his own personal Twitter up and running before he became president means that it’s a pretty good opportunity for him. But the opportunity and the danger is the lack of filter, basically.
He could reinvent the wheel, and kind of create a new paradigm for how transparent and communicative presidential candidates can be with the electorate, but he’d been speaking to us directly already. If he continues that, that could be a good thing.
Obama had the president’s official Twitter profile, and he would occasionally make somewhat political and measured statements, and that’s what we’re used to from politicians. If Trump uses Twitter the same way he’s been using it, to kind of vent his spleen and get back at people and react — or overreact, one might say — to things, then of course that’s going to be terrible for everyone. Because if he spends tons of time overreacting or worrying about what people are saying on Twitter and not focused on the world’s biggest issues, I think we all lose.
To me, there’s a huge opportunity, and if he was able to put some thick skin on there and not respond to everything like he did during the election, there’s a good opportunity for this to be a good thing. He has used it fairly savvily thus far, so I wouldn’t put it past him to be able to do that. It’s almost like giving him talking points about things that people are interested in, at times they’re actually willing to talk about this or are willing to engage.
The traditional way is just, ‘We’re going to have a press meeting at 2 p.m., but it’s not necessarily the time that the electorate’s paying the attention.’ The media’s paying attention, and of course we’re all going to see it in the news and the newspaper, but there’s this control that we all now have over what we consume.”