The First Twitter President

Abstract

Focusing on the ascendance of Trump to the White House and his first two years in office, this chapter explores how Trump’s use of Twitter, his campaign’s tricky tactics and questionable collaboration with companies like Cambridge Analytica, all coupled with the Russian Internet Agency’s successful exploitation of social media shed light on the true Achille’s heel of the networked citizen ideal, the embedded weakness that makes ‘being networked’ a quality that at the same time can be a force for good and a dangerous liability, an opportunity to fight the hubris of power and make the world a better place, all the while serving as fertile ground for social and political exploitation.