How Twitter got trolled

Last month, when the honchos of Silicon Valley met the POTUS-elect, one newspaper labelled it as the meeting between a mad scientist and his Frankenstein. In some ways, this must be true only for Twitter (more on this later). Donald Trump is a creature of imagination. He doesn’t really have laurels to rest on given his dismal track record but his admirers are sold by his limited vocabulary. They see in him what they want to. Whether they are mistaken can only be waited and watched. In any case, our leaders are often the manifestation of what can be done, not what has been done. When Obama entered the scene last decade, he was just a senator from Illinois without a remarkable CV but people saw change in his words. After 8 years, he leaves behind a debatable legacy. However, there is a lot of difference between these two presidential beings; the most interesting being the role social media played in their rising. When the aforementioned meeting took place, one could imagine the tension in that room. However, if one were to zoom in, Trump is more of a Twitter product than any other so-me platform. He has been active on the timeline for over half a decade now and his invective style of tweeting hasn’t changed. Even the decorum of White House couldn’t bring him to amend his petulant ways. Nope. Which is why it’s pertinent to state the significance of Twitter in his becoming because we keep reading premature obituaries of Twitter; how it failed to entice a wealthy buyer, how it couldn’t keep up with the changing times (nobody asks why the users refuse to change; does any of the tweeps want anything to change at all?) and how it has lost the users race to the likes of Snapchat and Pinterest. Twitter has barely 325 mn daily active users— Facebook has over a billion — but Trump doesn’t care much about other platforms. He’s madly in love with the blue bird. Besides, the impact of Twitter extends far beyond its users base. Media latches on to this platform for real-time direct-from-the-horse’s-mouth developments. We are reading how fake news made a splash on Facebook, enabling the 2016 elections to tilt but the tone was set within 140 characters. And continue to be. Whether we like it or not.

PS. I co-wrote an article in 2013 on the part social media might/could/would play in the 2014 general elections and none of the experts addressed in this piece could predict the role trolls will be playing in the future debates on Twitter (India). Can’t blame them though.