Twitter co-founder: I’m sorry if we made Trump’s presidency possible

This hits the nail on the head. Late stage capitalism has completely fused media, news, and entertainment. This means that any person or organization who manages to "hack" the news cycle (i.e. finds a way to be in the spotlight on a very regular basis) can reap great profits. Like a presidency.

I don't agree that he could have used any other social media to the same effect. Information propagates and decays on Twitter much, much faster than on other mainstream platforms: if I post something, everyone who follows me sees it right away, and very few tweets are seen a few days after they have been posted. No other mainstream social network is like this. These properties have led to Twitter becoming the new AP stream for journalists, aka the entry point to the news cycle. If you want to dominate the news cycle, dominate Twitter - be it with racist tweets or asking for free chicken nuggets.

Twitter as a media apparatus has naturally played a great part in electing Trump. The Twitter leadership isn't composed of economists or political scientists or sociologists, so of course this kind of stuff lies completely outside of their concern (unless it brings good PR, like it does now). Same goes for Facebook, although the role it plays in the equation is different.

If I choose, I can view ads and I can view spam. I choose not to, just as it's perfectly fine to not follow Donald Trump on Twitter. I am making the decision about what content I view.

An entity in power making that decision for me is censoring free speech. My choosing not to see things, is not.

If you value Liberalism, it's the actual ability to exchange information - independent of the ideas being shared - that makes the world a better place.

The problem is that this information may not be true, and even when it is true, people tend to dislike the 'exchange information and ideas' when they disagree with the information and ideas being exchanged. Williams says so himself:

> If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry

Sorry for what? Launching a platform where one can instantly read a wide variety of ideas and where narratives can be challenged as quickly as they're spun? It's like apologizing for creating the printing press because Martin Luther used it to kick off The Reformation.

Anyone who uses Twitter has witnessed legitimate - thus credible - reporters and news outlets spread incorrect stories, only for Twitter to quickly call them out.

So while much of Twitter may be poison, it beats relying solely on biased websites - such as the Washington Post - for information.

Anyone who has been a moderator on a public forum, let alone one as big as twitter, can quickly tell you that not all ideas are created equal.

I have said it before on this board of which is moderated, but if every single person spoke their mind the internet would be full of absolute garbage and hate, because those people tend to speak loudest and most often when given the chance.

To be clear I am not for censorship and I want to make sure there is a place for everyones legitimate views. But there is no sense in pretending free speech has to be a free for all. We can dismiss some things as objectively bad. Even a presidential debate has a moderator and there is an expected legitimacy to the discourse.