Obama and Twitter

Sometimes I get annoyed at stupid things. Things that at one time or another seem like a big deal, and then become not important at all when you look back at them. I feel like this post will fall into that category when I look back at it in the future, but here and now it’s annoying me.

For some reason I was annoyed by President Obama last week saying that he never used Twitter. Now, I am not naive enough to think that he actually maintained his own Twitter throughout the course of the election, but his entire campaign prided itself on this new era and new modes of campaigning. They used the internet to raise money, organize volunteers, and advance his cause, name and agenda better then any campaign ever seen. While I’m not mad that he didn’t necessarily use the account, I am shocked that in the same statement, he seemed to have only minimal knowledge of the tools used to help get him elected. Base on his answers to the questions, I came away with the impression that he only had a conversational knowledge of what mechanisms helped get him into the White House.

"Let me say that I have never used Twitter," Obama said in response to a question from a Chinese student about using Twitter freely in China. Obama continued: "I noticed that young people - they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone."The other account is @WhiteHouse, which was first set up to send out news about H1N1. @BarackObama has close to 2.7 million followers and @WhiteHouse has over 1.4 million followers. MG Siegler of TechCrunch, a non-partisan blog that reports on social media, wrote today, "Obviously, he had a killer team around him that was able to embrace the web...Still, it's somewhat surprising that he never sent any of his own tweets during the primaries."

While all of this is interesting, I think the larger issue here is who is allowed to run these accounts. The people that run these accounts have very powerful tool at their disposal: The namesake of the President of the United States. The people who run these accounts could advance anything they wanted to the millions of people that follow him on the various accounts. I wonder what the back-scenes workings are for his tweets. Is it one staff person who writes them? It is a team? Is it some intern who has the access to inform millions of people something? Who knows the passwords to the accounts? Etc.

As a citizen, it makes me uncomfortable to think that the mantle of the President could be used by a staff member. I understand maybe signing his name on a letter, or releasing a statement on his behalf, but both of those examples are forms of communication that have been vetted for decades. What are the modern media rules that the White House uses? Also all citizens should be concerned that it may take a mistake (of varying size)to prompt of series of rules to be put into place.