Ev Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and one of the major shareholders regrets the micro-blogging site’s roles in seeing US President Donald Trump to the Whitehouse, Business Insider reports. Trump had on several occasions acknowledged the roles of the social media in stacking his presidential victory, and it is a well-known fact that he dislikes mainstream traditional media.
President Trump in March told Fox News during an interview that he may not have become the elected US president if it were not for Twitter among other social media. “Well, let me tell you about Twitter,” he had said, “I think that maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter.”
Elaborating further, Trump revealed his dislike for the press since he perceives them as giving him unfair coverage. But with the social media, he has his own “form of media” that enables him to sidetrack the traditional media and address the American people directly and in minutes. It is a known fact that Donald Trump is very active on Twitter, and he has not ignored using Facebook and Instagram for his own little wars.
But considering the president’s acknowledged role of Twitter in his victory and the various reactions that attend his policies, the management of several social media platforms regret that they contributed one way or the other to his presidential victory. According to Ev Williams, “it’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that.”
A venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, revealed in a January interview that it appeared Twitter worked for Trump throughout 2016 even though they thought they were working for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders or the American people. Over 100 tech companies in Silicon Valley also oppose many of Trump’s policies, the recent being his travel ban.
Williams, who now owns his own blogging site Medium, but remains on the board of Twitter, likened the social media’s roles in providing Trump with the platform to win the presidency – to their own chagrin today – to democratizing technology and wrongfully putting its powers into the hands of everybody.
He relates it to a Greek mythology where Prometheus stole fire from the gods and handed it to humans; Zeus punished Prometheus for his folly. “Some would say that’s what we deserve for giving the power of tweets to Donald Trump,” Williams had said while addressing a set of new grads at the University of Nebraska.