Cartoon bad guy and also real-world bad guy Donald Trump is a historically prolific user of social media and also a historically inept user of technology. Let us never shake from our minds the image of Kellyanne Conway teaching him to use a computer, or any of the ample evidence that suggests that he does not know how to use a computer. His embrace of Twitter is not a function of his commercial of cultural savvy but instead of his own id, as it provides a place for his various insecurities and feuds to be magnified, affirmed, cajoled, enflamed, and reinforced. He does not understand Twitter; it is to Twitter’s infinite demerit that it accommodates him so well.
Unlike, say, Facebook, which strives to transcend language and age in its user-friendliness, Twitter is full of winks, secret handshakes, and subtle insults—subtweets, screen-capped subtweets, sarcastic over-usage of commas, real-name in-joke tribalism, the retweet and quoted retweet and classic retweet, and so on. One such technique is the threaded tweet, which is when you reply to yourself but then delete your name, such that any link to one of the tweets in the (shiver) “tweetstorm” will appear as part of a thread with all of the other tweets. It is essentially a way to continue a thought beyond 140 characters without (shiver) creating a Medium post about it.