Twitter Still Doesn't Understand Its Responsibilities
The company’s design decisions make it more likely that heads of state will wreak havoc with their words.
Twitter is designed to elicit frequent, unprompted, spontaneous, and unfiltered thoughts from its users, who come into conflict with one another as in no other medium, sometimes tweeting things they quickly regret.
Those qualities make Twitter a lively, diverting forum for daily conversation—and render it particularly ill-suited to world leaders, as I recently argued. The unparalleled power that the words of world leaders carry make it singularly fraught for them to broadcast unprompted, spontaneous, unfiltered thoughts. And the stakes for minimizing needless conflict among them could not be higher.
Thus, I urged,
