In a recent NYT Op-Ed Don’t Tweet About Health Care, James Othmer claims that:
“The president’s old friends, Twitter and Facebook, helped him get elected and then betrayed him. Social media help stir up excitement for “change we can believe in.” They are a much less effective tool for articulating the extraordinarily complicated details of health care reform.”
Gawker was kind enough to put together this helpful little graph to help articulate this phenomenon.
Could it be that Twitter is really the new democracy? All you need is a username and password and you can “tweet” about anything you want.
I always laugh when I hear people complain about the “Democracy” that we live in when in fact we live in a Republic that safeguards the rights of the Individual and The Minority. But Twitter is clearly a democratic system where the majority rules. I think that this shows more than Twitter turning on President Obama, but rather what the the majority of citizens want. Maybe we want Obama as President, but we don’t want the government running our healthcare?
Or maybe we are just like this guy and can’t make up our minds on what we want:
