What this discussion in the past week has brewing....is mostly about content.
From the 1700s through most of the 1900s....newspapers in America survived because they had content that people wanted to read. Without content, your paper would fold up and dissolve in a short period of time.
The Baltimore Sun....built up a huge legacy in the 1910 to 1930s era, with the help of H. L. Mencken. Mencken could write a 500 word essay piece and grown men would sit and weep over the description and blunt nature of the writing. He made the Sun....into a newspaper that folks in Baltimore, DC, and Arlington would read.
Silent movies took off....because they had content....a basic story.
Radio took off....because they found music, news commentary, and verbal plays to entertain people.
TV networks would take off because of comedy, drama, cowboy westerns, and gameshows.
AM radio took off in the 1980s because they found this one guy....Rush Limbaugh, who could talk about politics for two hours, and people were passionate to hear him speak.
The internet arrived in the 1990s, and found content.
Social media came along around 2010, and found content. Twitter and Facebook survive today....because they have content that draws people.
So here's the landscape....Jack Dorsey (the CEO of Twitter) is the 'gatekeeper' or 'librarian' of this operation. He'll freely admit, without content, his empire dissolves.
The problem here is that this library is 'free'. You walk in....dump your content, and people come to the Dorsey-library to read freely.
Through 2015, Jack and his team were all happy and gleeful. They didn't see a problem. They had content. They had advertising. Members of the team went off to Costa Rica each year to gaze at birds, smoke great weed, and sip very expensive French cognac.
But along about 2015....here came this Trump guy. Trump figured out that he didn't need ABC, or CBS. He didn't need the NY Times or Washington Post. He didn't need NPR or the AP. He just needed Twitter....talking direct to the American people. Funny thing about this.....he could easily write 140-character comment, and hit 'enter' on his own. He didn't need an army to run his talk-policy, or million-dollar-a-week poll people telling what to think or say.
Dorsey had never encountered something like this.
The big IT empire folks who were heavily screwed into the liberal agenda were dismayed. Jack needed to fix this. So they went and got 'editor' people....trying to pretend that they weren't going to screw with content, but that's exactly how they went at this.
People figured out the various games, and started to chat freely about Jack's childish operation. Jack still made money, but the people around him were furious....'you need to do something' was uttered daily to Jack.
This past week, Jack's team decided to finally fact-check Trump. The fact that they'd skipped 40-million bogus stories and lies....from various countries (Iran, China, etc)? Well....that got dumped into Jack's lap.
Jack has a problem.
Was the 'library' ever supposed to edit content? If you have a 'library' doing it....aren't they creating their content, or dissolving you of your 'content'? Can an intellectual even reach a level where facts are absolute?
Yeah, a bunch of questions arise. And Jack is in trouble.
So my two suggestions for Jack.
1. Announce that Twitter is turning the off-button 'ON' around Friday evening and shutting down Twitter for 48 hours....every single week. Let everyone know....from the right to the left, that Twitter is private and will stay that way. Get people used to the idea that Twitter won't work on weekends. It's mostly to make a point.
2. All of this was free. It shouldn't be. Just to gaze at the library, without commentary, you ought to be paying $7.99 a month, and limit customers to just 100 people to follow. Next step up....with commentary added and 500 people to follow, $29. Finally at the premium level.....$49 a month, for all privileges. On this privilege, make it clear....that's absolute open content. If people don't want that last privileage....don't pay the $49 a month, and just get limited service.
As for this Order from Trump fixing the mess? No....I would seriously doubt it. It'll be challenged in court, and take a full year to reach the Supreme Court. I'm sure RBG will be sitting there and asking what the hell Twitter is, and couldn't things just easily work without involving the President.
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