By Elizabeth White, News Editor
Donald Trump using Twitter as a way to express the thoughts that pop into his head is a dangerous new situation for the United States.
The problem with Trump and his Twitter presence is that he doesn’t appear to think before he tweets, and what he says has a huge impact.
“He is reckless, cavalier, condescending, obnoxious, irresponsible and insulting, among other things,” William Cohan said in a New York Times article.
Trump’s presidency is different than any of his predecessors because of the way he can divert the media’s attention with a single tweet.
It is typical for a president to get media attention on a daily basis, but Trump is unique in this way in which he expresses himself.
Trump’s tweets have had “the unfortunate tendency of warping and dominating nearly every single news cycle, day after day,” Cohan said.
“With all due respect, America cannot afford a Twitter presidency,” Senator Chuck Schumer said, according to The New York Times.
Lauren Weinstein, the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, believes that Trump’s tweeting actually violates some of Twitter’s terms of service.
This includes his “continuing direct attacks on individuals” and how some of his tweets inspire “massive secondary attacks from his followers and others,” whereas “any ordinary user would have been either temporarily or permanently banned long ago,” according to the New York Times.
The president tweeting on a regular basis is unlike anything that has been done before, and it may be compromising America’s national security.
“Intelligence and defense specialists believe the president-elect’s use of the popular and powerful social media network is already being used by foreign agencies to analyze his personality, track his habits and detect clues about what to expect from a Trump-led American government,” Politico reported prior to Trump’s inauguration.
And the risk of misconstruing and misunderstanding information is higher when a tweet is limited to 140 characters.
The problem with Trump expressing his thoughts on Twitter is that there is not a lot of room for context or explanation. This may lead the public to take tweets differently than Trump may have intended.
Donald Trump needs to either stop tweeting or start doing so in a more “presidential” manner. We cannot have a president who starts Twitter fights and is willing to compromise our national security.
