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I'm not. There's a natural scarcity of space for physical cameras and reporters. As far as I understand, the press themselves are largely responsible for figuri
by cle 6y ago
I'm not. There's a natural scarcity of space for physical cameras and reporters. As far as I understand, the press themselves are largely responsible for figuring out these logistics via the WHCA. (Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
There isn't any practical scarcity for text streams coming from the White House though, so I can't think of a reason why consuming them should be tied to a closed platform like Twitter, other than marginal costs of setting up and operating the infrastructure (perhaps not so marginal once we start talking about government contracts?).
- SllX 6y agoYour point is good but I think the reality is just really mundane: the government could put out its own text streams and multi-publish them to different platforms, but it’s just not there yet. There’s no fire under anyone’s ass to get it done, if it’s even occurred to anyone in a position to do something about it in the past uh... 14 years? However I would be fully on board with Twitter banning world leaders and IP blocking their capitals including the entire city of Washington. They won’t, that’s a value destroying proposition, but a man can dream.
- Analemma_ 6y agoTwitter isn't "a closed platform" in the sense that is relevant here. If I want to read the President's tweets without a Twitter account, I can.
- cle 6y agoThat's not the sense that I was using, and I don't think it's a relevant point either. What's important IMO is that the platform and the data are not controlled by elected officials.
- wutbrodo 6y agoWell, sort of. Not if they remove it. The fact that they (mostly) haven't exercised this control so far over world leaders' tweets is a matter of internal policy at Twitter.