Why it’s terrifying that Twitter is introducing stories

Trump doesn’t just grandstand on Twitter, he makes actual laws there. In 2017, the President went to Twitter to ban transgender soldiers from the military. In 2019, instead of formally firing his Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen through the usual channels, he terminated her employment by Tweet. Perhaps the most worrying example of Twitter standing in for official procedure was when Trump used it as the only means of letting congress know he was ordering a nuclear strike on Iran, bringing the world to within an inch of all-out war.

It’s madness, but it’s the world we live in, for worse or worse. And Twitter’s only compensation for this constant teetering on the edge of chaos by notification is its permanence. As one of the world’s most valuable tools of political communication it also functions as one of its most vital means of political accountability.

As primary sources, Trump’s Twitter feed and those of his contemporaries serve as records for the direction and execution of the current presidency, and possibly will do for future presidencies. Just as medieval scribes sat in abbots recording kingly decrees with their quills, Twitter is living history. Though Trump, or indeed any Twitter user, can delete their Tweets, the theory of their permanence is what makes them valuable. If you remove that element, the already reckless act of policy making via social media will be amplified ten-fold.

Trump is not some 17-year-old wannabe influencer sending a quick mirror selfie to his crush. By his own design these Tweets are his official statements, leading to the assumption that impermanent Tweets could be used to create permanent laws. I shudder at the potential image of Trump’s orange face ordering US troops to attack Baghdadi air bases peeking out of a dog filter.

Tweets often feel brash and spur of the moment, but they shouldn’t be allowed to be literally so. The Trump administration has already tried to use Twitter’s ambiguity to dribble inflammatory policy into its operating system only to deny the fact. When Trump’s office introduced the Muslim travel ban in 2017, the Supreme Court was brought in to judge the law’s constitutionality.

In order to imply that a limit on Islamic immigration was precautionary and not racist, Trump was keen not to use the word ‘ban’ on official documents, though this was exactly how he was referring to the policy on Twitter. Prosecutors fingered the Tweets as evidence of the true intentions of the government.

Whilst the supreme court ultimately upheld Trump’s policy, precedent for taking people at their tweets is already in play. If Twitter is where politics goes to happen, then it needs to also be a place that facilitates the sharing and discussion of ideas. Fleets that cannot be interacted with are the antithesis of this.

Moreover, in a world already rife with misinformation and ‘fake news’, where deep fakes and photoshop can weave complete fictions ex nihilo, we cannot be relying on screenshots and half remembered glances to try to interpret the words of our leaders.

A society whose foundation is built on 280 characters is an unstable one to be sure. A society built on foundations that crumble after 24 hours is doomed.