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Twitter Cut Out of Trump Tech Meeting Over Failed Emoji Deal, Says Report (politico.com)
According to Politico, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary. Trump's adviser Sean Spicer denied the report, saying "the conference table was only so big." Politico reports: Twitter was one of the few major U.S. tech companies not represented at Wednesday afternoon's Trump Tower meeting attended by, among others, Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, and Tesla's Elon Musk -- an omission all the more striking because of Trump's heavy dependence on the Twitter platform. Trump's campaign also made a $5 million deal with Twitter before the election, in which the campaign committed "to spending a certain amount on advertising and in exchange receive discounts, perks, and custom solutions," the campaign's director of digital advertising and fund raising, Gary Coby, wrote in a Medium post last month. So the campaign objected when the company refused to allow the anti-Clinton emoji. Coby wrote that Dorsey personally intervened to block the Trump operation from deploying the emoji, which would have shown, in various renderings, small bags of money being given away or stolen. That emoji would have been offered to users as a replacement for the hashtag #CrookedHillary, a preferred Trump insult for his Democratic opponent. Spicer also objected to the company's refusal, telling the Washington Examiner in October that "while Twitter claims to be a venue that promotes the free exchange of ideas, it's clear that it's leadership's left wing ideology literally trumps that." POLITICO's source said Spicer, who's also the Republican National Committee spokesman, was the one who made the call to refuse an invitation to Dorsey or other Twitter executives to Wednesday's meeting.
The fact that you don't call something a program isn't meaningful, is it? It's not a microblog either. Twitter is a company, if you insist on being literal.
> It's like slashdot now lets complete technical retrogrades post here.
What does Twitter have to do with technology? I don't see it. Their "tech" is so humble that even your aunt couldn't possibly be impressed by it.
Right now, Mr. Trump is the person who lost the popular vote. By millions of votes.
He's not the president-elect unless the electoral college vote next week overrides the popular vote.
That will probably happen, based on arbitrary pro-bias applied to votes coming out of low-population regions (and outright abandonment of the EC's obligation to pick a qualified candidate); but until/unless it does happen, Mr. Trump's operating on an assumption, not an election, and so is anyone else who assumes this is a done deal.
Moving forward after the EC votes, assuming Mr. Trump wins that vote, anyone who thinks that he "won the election" might want to keep in mind that the majority of Americans selected Mrs. Clinton -- by a significant margin, as in, no doubt about it. The election he would have won is that of the electoral college, that august institution that disenfranchises the citizens of their votes. He has no mandate. We're also already seeing considerable congressional resistance to many of his stated goals.
So don't be too smug.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.