Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Twitter Control

I know that Hillary Clinton and John McCain are all now within Obama's team, but one would think that they would not all be saying exactly the same thing and almost exactly the same time. However it seems that the Obama machine is now in charge of all their Twitter accounts and so, if you are sad/unlucky/fortunate (delete as appropriate) to subscribe to all you end up with the feed (left). So who really thought that the live confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor needed that much publicity? More substantially, does this not suggest the stifling of the voices of those included into government because of their talent, I know it is 'only' Twitter, but it suggests a strong control mechanism over public/political communication from anyone with the Obama team. This seems to run counter to the notion of including your rivals and to the open and transparent image of the administration. or am I just a pedant?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi there! I agree with you, that means a strong control of any message any member of Obama Administration could give regarding any issue. Different opinions shouldn't be expressed on the same matters, then. On the other hand we shouldn't forget getting message simple is an objective of any political party, so showing a single voice is then necessary. Besides having a slight variety of opinions can also be used by the media as a weapon to make democrats appear as slightly divided. Lack of transparency vs lack of party unity, that's the issue here. It's a shame we have got to this situation, yeah.