News Comment (November 9)

A really interesting story has been developing over the last weekend about the deactivation of Donald Trump’s Twitter account for 11 minutes on Thursday (November 2nd). I saw this story right after I posted last weeks news comment and I wished I had covered it then but I didn’t so now I am doing it for this week causing me to post my news comment early.

The story I have linked to is more of an overall reporting of the situation from the NY Times the day after they originally reported it. In just the 24 hours they had reported that it was deactivated, that an employee on his final day was responsible, and that it was actually a contractor who was responsible. I am now glad that I did put off using this story as a news comment because I think its an interesting look in to how major news companies report things.

This was a developing story that many people were interested in because the President was involved. The news value of celebrity was obviously the driving factor here. Because of this the media reported every single update. This article, though it is a NY Times length article gives a good overview of what happened, what was reported/what is most likely true at this stage, and some reasons why this will affect Twitter as well as other companies that use contractors. I found some of the new information on Twitters previous scrutiny because it gives a whole new dynamic to the reaction to this particular incident. Honestly I didn’t care about Trump’s Twitter being deleted, especially since it was only down for 11 minutes, but I did care about the fact that someone could decide to delete an account. Finding out more about Twitters situation was a more interesting story for me and they needed the celebrity angle to make this newsworthy because I found the prank’s general conceit troubling but not interesting enough to read about but I found it funny that someone did it to Trump therefore I clicked on the story.



1 Comment so far

  1.   fuglsang on November 14th, 2017

    The fact that one person could take down an account (or maybe the whole system, who knows) was the story here. The fact it was Trump’s account kind of obscured the real news.

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