Find out who is behind Pres. Obama’s Twitter Account

• Posted on April 10, 2013April 10, 2013
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Barack Obama is a busy man, what with budget negotiations, gun control issues, international crises and the ever – present back and forth political foolery of Washington.

So why should he send out tweets on twitter?

According to an article on the Atlantic Wire, he doesn’t anymore.

‘All of the president’s named social media accounts have been handed over to a non-partisan, not-for-profit group that isn’t overly concerned if you didn’t notice the transition,’ Phillip Bump wrote in the article, published Monday.

Some of this is, of course, Washington hairsplitting. Though @BarackObama has existed since his candidate days in 2007, most of the posts have been handled by his staff. (Occasionally, the president has posted something himself, tweets denoted by his ‘-bo’ signature in the tweet.)

The account, which has 29 million followers, has now been handed over to Organizing for Action, an offshoot of the president’s 2012 campaign operation.

It’s as if, Bump wrote, “the president mid-conversation, handed his phone to a telemarketer who does a great Obama impression. Or, to be more accurate, one telemarketer – the campaign – handed the phone to another one.”

There are legal issues involved – the presidential campaign was set up according to one set of guidelines, and Organizing for Action functions under another — but there’s a larger ethical point as well: Should we believe that tweets are actually coming from the person who owns the twitter account?

After all, even though Twitter takes pains to classify some accounts as “verified” – a service they do proactively, according to the Twitter website —  who knows who’s really on the other end?  It’s an old internet conundrum, best described by the classic New Yorker cartoon caption “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”

Credit: CNN