{"id":1697,"date":"2009-06-24T01:59:17","date_gmt":"2009-06-24T06:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinbryant.com\/?p=1697"},"modified":"2009-06-24T01:59:17","modified_gmt":"2009-06-24T06:59:17","slug":"be-ye-careful-what-ye-twit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/be-ye-careful-what-ye-twit\/","title":{"rendered":"be ye careful what ye twit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Got a Political Career? Don’t Tweet It Away.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>By Chris Cillizza,\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0TO: Politicians\u00a0FROM: The Fix<\/p>\n

SUBJECT: Twitter is not your friend. No doubt any number of your colleagues have urged you to begin Twittering — sending your thoughts on life, the universe and everything out to the world in bite-sized, 140-character chunks.<\/p>\n

Don’t do it.<\/p>\n

Twitter may be all the rage for athletes, Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and even the Fix, but it is a bad, bad idea for politicians. Why?<\/p>\n

To with: Less than 24 hours after President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) tweeted — to the nearly 400,000 people who follow him on Twitter — the following proclamation: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”<\/p>\n

Those 95 characters (he still had 45 in reserve!) kicked off a furor that led Gingrich to acknowledge last week that his “initial reaction was strong and direct — perhaps too strong and direct.” Oopsie!<\/p>\n

An isolated incident amid a sea of tweets, you say? We have two words for you: Mark Shurtleff.<\/p>\n

Shurtleff, the Republican attorney general in Utah, had been for months publicly mulling the possibility of challenging Sen. Bob Bennett in 2010.<\/p>\n

Thinking he was sending a text message to a friend last month, Shurtleff tweeted this to his 2,329 closest Twitter friends: “I’m announcing I’m running at 12 . . . all of the legislative conservative caucus and other senators representatives there endorsing me . . . time to rock and roll!” Seven minutes later, Shurtleff realized his mistake and tweeted (hair of the dog, we suppose) that he was removing the previous post.<\/p>\n

Duh!<\/p>\n

The lesson proved by Gingrich and Shurtleff is that any medium that encourages instant reactions dashed off on a BlackBerry or iPhone and condensed into 140 characters is a recipe for disaster in the political arena.<\/p>\n

Sure, in theory it makes sense to provide benign daily updates letting your constituents know you are hard at work fighting for them.<\/p>\n

And it is “kinda cool” — as Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a titan of political Twitterers, described a recent tweet interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper — to use the technology to break down traditional communication borders.<\/p>\n

But, as in college when you were coming home from a party and it seemed like a good idea to call the object of your affections to let him or her know how you really felt, Twitter provides short-term gain in exchange for long-term pain.<\/p>\n

The thousands of innocuous tweets you send won’t matter. It’s the one time that you decide to pop off in the space of 140 characters — perhaps after a cocktail or two at a fundraiser — where problems will arise. Make one slip of the tongue, er, finger, and the sweet joys of Twitter will sour in a moment.<\/p>\n

Put simply: Twitter is an amazing and earth-shattering technology — for someone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Got a Political Career? Don’t Tweet It Away. By Chris Cillizza,\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0TO: Politicians\u00a0FROM: The Fix SUBJECT: Twitter is not your friend. No doubt any number of your colleagues have urged you to begin Twittering — sending your thoughts on life, the universe and everything out to the world in bite-sized, 140-character chunks. Don’t do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2gEQ0-rn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevinbryant.com\/kbarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}