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$8
“The White House hasn’t decided whether it would pay $8 a month to maintain verification of its Twitter accounts,” Bloomberg reports. Said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “I don’t believe it’s an issue that made it to the president’s desk yet, not a conversation that the president is aware of. That’s something for the president that we need to talk to the president about.”
“Twitter’s problems run far deeper than a problematic owner. To begin with, it’s structurally designed to impede complex discussion by forcing users to reduce all topics to 240-character soundbites. This can be a fun way to react to Game of Thrones, but it is not a good way to litigate economic policy or geopolitical conflicts. The constricted format impedes free-flowing conversation while privileging performative sloganeering. This is why Donald Trump, who seemingly never had a complex thought in his life, loved Twitter. Why our intellectual elite has decided to yoke the public discourse to a site whose most successful users are people like Trump is less understandable.”