Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Keeping Up With the Intertoobs



Because I don't think anybody who isn't on Twitter is aware of this (who do you think is putting Joe Biden at 22% right now?  Millenials?)  It's not on anybody else's radar.  "Big drama" is a matter of context, after all.  Although I don't mind the tweets:


I just don't think that many people in the electorate know who George Conway is, or care.  By way of example, the Devin Nunes suit, where he claims parody Twitter accounts almost (!) cost him his re-election bid (a classic example of precisely what the First Amendment is supposed to allow, per the Supreme Court; a supreme irony in Nunes claim, but that's another matter):

In the complaint, Nunes even argues that the “defamation” hindered his 2018 reelection campaign, which he won but by narrower margins than in previous years. (He does not note that his congressional seat was a top target for Democrats, which is a more likely reason for the narrow margin of victory than three Twitter accounts, one of which only had 1,700 followers at the time the complaint was filed.) (emphasis added)
People on Twitter think the world revolves around Twitter; but people not on Twitter barely know it even exists.  So the Twitter war between Trump and Conway?  Not really that big a deal, and it does more to denigrate the President ("Doesn't he have a job?") than benefit him.   Besides:


"Mr. Kellyanne Conway" is the worst insult Trump can imagine.  And I suppose among old (really old; older than me, and Trump is less than 10 years my senior) white men (whiter than me, too, if that's possible), it is.  But for the rest of us?  It says more about Trump than about his target; but it doesn't say anything we didn't already know.

On the other, other hand, this is certainly strange behavior:



2 comments:

  1. I suppose it was the Mr. KAC for Trump, it would be being associated with her that would cause me shame.

    I do have to say that the Devin Nunes lawsuit is causing him so much embarrassment that it was almost enough to make me go on twitter. Almost enough but not enough.

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  2. I'm not on Twitter, I just browse there.

    Nunes' lawsuit, IMHLO, gets dumped before discovery, because he has no cause of action. You can't sue for hurt feelings under libel law, and you can't sue for not winning an election by a large enough margin, under the 1st Amendment (or any other legal theory, as there really isn't a cause of action for not winning by a big enough margin). I don't think the court is going to have much patience with such nonsense, and the upside is the Nunes effect replacing the Streisand effect as a doctrine of being self-pwned.

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