Obama’s new personal Twitter account does not live up to its claim
President Barack Obama tweeted from his own Twitter handle for the first time this May 18, greeting the Twittersphere with this light-hearted greeting: ?”@POTUS: Hi Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! After six years they’re finally giving me my own account.”
After years of posting via his staff-run @BarackObama Twitter handle, Mr. President gets to experience for himself the nerve-wracking social pressures of having to create his own content for his millions of followers.
In a way, this is a great relatability move. It’s as if President Obama is saying, “Hey guys! It’s me, your President, but I’m just like you! I have a Twitter now, and also I have to pour over every character to ensure I have maximum impact in every tweet. We can all be anxious on the Internet together, lolz!” Because he’s not a normal President, he’s a ?cool President.
But why make a Twitter now? According to a White House press release, the Twitter account is to be used as a means for President Obama to engage with the American people directly, presumably to address issues of national importance. However, it’s quickly becoming clear that that’s not happening.
When I sifted through the replies to his tweets as well as his mentions, I only found perhaps one or two tweets that could be perceived as true engagements about policy issues. One woman expressed her concern about Medicare cuts, but the tweet went unrecognized by the President or anyone else.
Another young woman asked a thought-provoking question about marijuana legislation and received more attention from the general Twitter public, but ?@POTUS did not create a tweet regarding pardons ?for marijuana legislation.
It’s not to say either of these necessarily needed a handcrafted response from the President, but the lack of conversational engagement with them at all shows that this Twitter fell short. President Obama’s Twitter handle has a good heart to it, but tweets to him about real concerns get swallowed up in the vast sea of Internet trolls that lurk beneath the Twitter bridge.
President Obama received many hate tweets, most of which more vulgar than this one, as well as an odd grouping of tweets that referred to him as “Dad.”
One politically-conscious American called on the expertise of notoriously racist and homophobic Vine star Nash Grier to help him deport the President of the United States. So, it’s clear, at least after a couple of days, the @POTUS Twitter account isn’t really doing its intended job. And I don’t think it’s necessarily realistic to ?expect it to.
President Obama is arguably the busiest person in the United States right now. He can’t really sit in the back of a lecture hall and reply to tweets under his desk like we can. He has to meet with representatives from Baltimore to attempt to solve the police crisis, encourage bipartisanship across the nation’s lawmakers and the list goes on.
@POTUS is cute for sure, but it’s just another way to humanize the President and document a select amount of his day-to-day activities. It will never be the kind of open and engaging conversation the White House, or any politically-aware tweeter, would have hoped it would be.
meickhof@indiana.edu
