you really have to understand twitter as trump's personal marketing/branding channel, not a presidential communications platform. it's safe to ignore. anything of import will be released through a myriad of other media.

He can't block anyone, so the news will report on anything important, meaning nobody has to use Twitter to see what he posts.

Trump generally uses Twitter to fire up his base and give the other side something to stew over.

It's pretty well documented most of the garbage he spews on there has little basis in reality. But... Want to slip in an extra 500 mil in funding for planned parenthood or fund a new surveillance program without raising eyebrows? Simply make a xenophobic comment or say something vague enough that the press spend the next week making fools of themselves while his base just can't get enough napkins to clean themselves up..

Obama got that trick down too, just send the press release on Friday at about 8pm. By the time Monday rolls around, nobody cares.

The tactic has worked out really well for trump as well. He's actually been pretty milquetoast, even moderately more progressive in comparison with other similar democrats such as Bill Clinton or JFK policy wise.

He's also done a pretty good number on dismantling What's left of the tea party conservatives or republicans who espouse the ideas of limiting and reducing government, Not just reducing taxes without reducing govt.

He's essentially transforming the Republican party into the Democrat party of the 80's. All this because people love their narratives, orange man bad or Cheeto Jesus saves

Ask your lawmakers to require public agencies and officials to run their own social media infrastructure based on implementations of open standards.

For example, the article mentions they knew about browsing habits but that wouldn't be the case if they couldn't see you.

I suppose it comes down to "we have the data, so let's use it"... we need to stop the mass-gathering in the first place then these "bugs" are meaningless.

Twitter runs mostly their own ads afaik, so they don't face this problem.

This is also why Twitter having problems is such a big deal; as far as I'm aware, Twitter is serving their own ad-tracking code, rather than a third-party's code. Thus, it's harder to block completely, and any vulnerabilities might (somewhat) affect even users that are running privacy extensions.

Third-party ads inserted via javascript behave as you describe.

Blocking third-party cookies (by using ublock origin or a pi-hole or firefox) helps prevent more actors from observing your online activity, but simply by being in the ad auction, third parties can get a lot of indirect information (via real-time bidding, or RTB).

The revenue model might be slightly different from platforms like AdSense, where instead of paying per 1M impressions you would maybe choose a newspaper like model where the advertiser pays a fixed price depending on the property that displays the ad.

And the cherry on top: All of this would be GDPR compliant right out of the box, so no hour-long fiddling with the ToS agreement.

Selling advertisements based on impressions incentivizes publishers to maximize impressions through various means such as click-bait titles, auto-refreshing ads while you're on the page, or implementing slideshows. All of these things degrade a website's experience in the long-term for the sake of ekeing out a few more dollars in the short term.

I don't use Twitter, and your reasoning is a complete non-sequitur.

I don't play golf, and the President plays lots of it. How is that possible? By... my not playing golf.

You can't even conflate the two. Twitter is his method of communicating to us. He doesn't use the media like previous president's.

But will be widely reported in every other media channel anyway, so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly. In fact, you might gain a little useful filtering, depending on your range of new outlet choices of course, and conversely there is a sort of reverse filter because you are less likely to miss things that are rather quickly deleted.

You lose the credibility of a primary source.

I guess we all must have forgotten just how bad the reporting was in 2016 with his <1% chance of winning.

I'll take a more direct source than one that is linked through a web of news sites so it's impossible to find the original source. "Experts say"

Twitter whether you like it or not is Trump's primary communication to the US public.

Just because you can get it elsewhere doesn't mean that the source you're getting it from isn't biased one way or another.

Twitter is not a requirement. I don't understand how anyone could possibly think it was, or be insulted by people saying it isn't. It seems like a cack-handed attempt at advertising to insist that everyone must use Twitter.

We have these things called news outlets, newspapers, and so forth. Apparently these places take an interest in what the president does. weird, I know...

In fact, I would imagine sites like twitter have more control over the ads placed on them than many websites for local papers.

B) Whenever announcements or tweets or other newsworthy events are reported in the paper, I still like to go to the primary source to get the full context.

So, the solution you propose really is an incomplete solution that doesn't address the problem.

If they post information only on Twitter ... well, it's not that important. I bet some of us lose perspective on the relative importance of messages when they are coming in from all directions.

It flat out amazes me how important people think twitter is to their daily lives.

That somehow when I see various outlets reporting on a tweet, and quoting it, that somehow that isn't enough because it doesn't have twitter.com in the URL?

What is it you're trying to say about me here?

Because I don't use twitter.