I think one man's flaw might be another man's feature in this case:

> The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse.

    <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>

-- https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input...

It’s faster than traditional means and they can craft the narrative completely (unlike newspapers, TV news)

This is the main reason. Twenty years ago it was very hard to get your message as Government out there to the people, with media being the only conduit to do so, of course with their own agenda. Now if you want to communicate a point, or refute something, you can hop on Twitter and sort it out.

It would be just as fast to give high level officials a textbox and a submit button that adds content to a web page.

But if people are only reading on social media, then they will only see it when someone else posts it there (e.g. a newspaper). Or I’ll read it from a newspaper and it’s still filtered through someone’s perspective, unless it’s an op ed. To reach people directly, you need people to be regularly checking wherever you post. Probably what GP meant by being able to create the narrative better on social media.

People won't continuously reload a web page that is a political leader's stream of thought?

Something can be a highly currated narrative and be accessible to everyone. Shit, people even have web browsers on their phones and computers these days. Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, does not encourage the creation of highly currated narratives.

We should probably invent a publish-subscribe distributed protocol for this, maybe some kind of Really Simple Syndication.

> We should probably invent a publish-subscribe distributed protocol for this, maybe some kind of Really Simple Syndication.

+1 for that. Was RSS just too much effort to catch on? Or was discovery the issue? It's a great thing.

You can use the word “should” all you want, but the fact is that Twitter is where most people are today. And when you’re trying to your message out, that matters.

This is what makes me roll my eyes at anyone who says getting kicked of Twitter is being “silenced”. Make a web page and you have broader and more direct reach than almost anyone on Earth 20 years ago.

But not today.

> But not today.

Exactly. That was kind of like telling a content creator to build a web site and post videos there after getting kicked off YouTube. Sure, only a fraction of their fanbase will start using their site to consume their content, but hey, at least they have a broader reach than almost anyone on Earth had 20 years ago.

My point is that while it may suck, it’s not the violation of human rights that some people treat it as. So I understand if someone kicked off YouTube complains about it but I’m not going to entertain the idea they’ve been silenced.

The governments and politicians got more trite and flippant to match.

Twitter (and Facebook) might have problems and ill effects on large numbers of people, but they are a reliable way of getting a message out to a group of people--in the case of Twitter, to anyone (even if you don't have a Twitter account, you can visit https://twitter.com/AccountName for updates).

Could the government have built such a system by commission for the public good (after all it was directly involved in the Internet, the substrate thereof), or is this something that was only able to coalesce with private capital, markets, and profit motive?

Don't take anything said on Twitter at face value, and repeat this to anyone repeating anything said on Twitter (including websites that might include Tweets). Hopefully they will, at some point, get the memo ?

Take this as you will but you may(or may not) be aware that twitter is nowadays regarded as a news source by mainstream media journalists

Yes, journalists are one of the the most important people that should get this memo. I've been telling them this at any opportunity for years now. Funnily, Trump getting banned hurts my case.

Journalists go where there is the news. These days, the news is on Twitter, and that is the real problem.

Actually, the problem isn't Twitter per se, is that we've found out it's easier to digest (and regurgigate, and fabricate upon) 140 characters at a time. Twitter has inadvertently found an incredible exploit and vulnerability of the human mind, and now it's out there and we're fucked, excuse the French.

Even if Twitter were to die tomorrow, my conjecture is that most of the news and media will move to some other form of short-and-easy-and-dumb social network. 140 characters is what the TV was to the radio.

The news are still in the "real world", but I guess it's much more expensive to do journalism there… (thankfully, investigative journalism isn't dead yet)

The comparison with radio => TV breaks down when you realize that TV is a medium much richer in information than both 140/280-character text and radio. (Of course Twitter is not just text these days.)

But anyway, I'm much more concerned about not so much journalists themselves, but rather about those people that are still trying to have discussions on Twitter. Starting with politicians, for obvious reasons.

Twitter is on a show-and-tell mission since recently after it deplatformed Donald Trump.

Didn't that start actually when Trump became president?