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How Twitter broke the news

This hits the nail on the head:

"No one chasing money in media ever chased Twitter. But anyone chasing power found themselves irresistibly drawn to the platform. And eventually, the platform started to actually deliver that power in ways that continue to reverberate around the world."

I do bristle at the use of Trump and Bernie Sanders as equivalent extremes presented here: one is a fascist demagogue who threatens to undermine American (and perhaps global) democracy, and the other would like people to have healthcare and not die from poverty.

Still, this is why Twitter was important, why it's being missed, and why it was important that it eventually died (albeit not in the way that it actually did). It was about power and influence, wrapped in a dangerous context collapse.

I believe conversation should be democratized: anyone should be able to message the President, or the CEO of Apple, or whichever person is normally behind layers of security and PR and plexiglass. But perhaps not for the benefit of someone else's company, and not in a way that is so fundamentally against the public interest.

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