Post by ck4829 on Dec 13, 2016 14:06:40 GMT
Trump’s social media habits were a subject of amusement throughout the election season, but they have now become cause for alarm. His recent tweet criticizing Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Union 1999, resulted in a swarm of anonymous threats to Jones and his family.
Other stories have since emerged, such as that of Lauren Batchelder, an 18 year-old student who was called “an arrogant young woman” and “a plant” by Trump on Twitter for challenging him about his support for women at a campaign event in New Hampshire a year ago. Trump’s director of social media tweeted out screengrabs of Batchelder’s social-media accounts just hours after the event, and supporters of the candidate immediately followed up with graphic, often sexual threats on email and Facebook, and the circulation of her home address online.
When asked about his aggressive tweeting, Trump likes to say that it provides a direct connection to the public, bypassing a corrupt media. As he said on the Today Show, “Frankly, it’s a modern-day form of communication... I get it out much faster than a press release. I get it out much more honestly than dealing with dishonest reporters. So many reporters are dishonest.”
This populist call for an unmediated link between the president and the people — which is in fact a strategy of mobilizing one segment of the population against others — is rooted in the rise of the populist right in the U.S. and, perhaps not surprisingly, in Richard Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech.
www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-lowndes/the-authoritarian-potenti_b_13558344.html
Other stories have since emerged, such as that of Lauren Batchelder, an 18 year-old student who was called “an arrogant young woman” and “a plant” by Trump on Twitter for challenging him about his support for women at a campaign event in New Hampshire a year ago. Trump’s director of social media tweeted out screengrabs of Batchelder’s social-media accounts just hours after the event, and supporters of the candidate immediately followed up with graphic, often sexual threats on email and Facebook, and the circulation of her home address online.
When asked about his aggressive tweeting, Trump likes to say that it provides a direct connection to the public, bypassing a corrupt media. As he said on the Today Show, “Frankly, it’s a modern-day form of communication... I get it out much faster than a press release. I get it out much more honestly than dealing with dishonest reporters. So many reporters are dishonest.”
This populist call for an unmediated link between the president and the people — which is in fact a strategy of mobilizing one segment of the population against others — is rooted in the rise of the populist right in the U.S. and, perhaps not surprisingly, in Richard Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech.
www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-lowndes/the-authoritarian-potenti_b_13558344.html
