Donald Trump Is Back to Pretending Russia Had Nothing to Do With That Whole Election Hacking Thing. President Donald Trump remains at least relatively sure it is not him but everyone else who is the titanic idiot, per freshly hired goon and White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who said on Sunday Trump still does not believe Russia was behind the 2. Democratic email systems. On CNNs State of the Union, Scaramucci said he had discussed the matter with the president and He basically said to me, Hey you know, this is, maybe they did it, maybe they didnt do it. The mainstream media position on this, that they interfered in the election, Scaramucci added. It actually in his mind, what are you guys suggesting Youre going to delegitimize his victoryWhile Scaramucci neglected to note every US intelligence agency has publicly supported the conclusion the Russian government was behind the hacks, he did add Trump will require more time to make up his mind on the issue. How very interesting, seeing as it seems like Trump has actually thought about the hacking obsessively. News, insights and authoritative opinion exploring the media industry in New York and beyond. A noisy cheer went up from the crowd of hackers clustered around the voting machine tucked into the back corner of a casino conference roomtheyd just managed to. A2 Tool For Sony Ericsson. Hes been all over the place on this thing, releasing incredibly deluded statements claiming the hacks did not influence the course of the election, and at times pinning the blame for the hacks on other countries, China, a 1. At one point, he even suggested the Democratic National Committee hacked itself to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader. For a brief time this summer, a glimpse of a more lucid Trump seemed to shine through, with the White House saying the president agreed it was probably Russia. But Trump is a flat circle, and not a very big one. In any case, this weekend Trump also seemed to hint he believes he could just pardon himself and anyone else on his team federal investigators find colluded with said hackers, so thats nice for him. CNN. An Official Tweetstorm Feature Will Ruin Twitter Again. Twitter is reportedly testing a feature on its Android app that would automatically reformat large blocks of text into long self reply threads, or tweetstorms. This would ruin Twitter, which has already been ruined multiple times by new features. Past Twitter ruining features include GIPHY integration, which encourages mediocre GIF responses that turn a viral tweets replies into a wall of samey celebrity animations. A heightened reply limit lets users drag a dozen strangers into an unwanted public thread group DMs let spammers drag a dozen strangers into an unwanted private thread. Quote tweeting turns the timeline into a look at this strangers bad tweet wall of shame. The algorithmic timeline makes conversation around live events Twitters killer app incoherent hashtags try to fix that, but instead they make normies write like robots in hopes of gaining a hundredth follower. Twitter just added a new feature that lets you add a seemingly infinite number of people to aRead more Read. The moments tab is condescending the reporting feature is half assed and easily abused, as is banning notifications include useless information like someone liked a reply to you. Likes were better as faves. Live updating reaction counts are distracting lists are awkward self replies mean tweets move around in your timeline as youre trying to read them multi user threading is impossible to parse now so everyone thinks theyre being insulted by their own team. Verification carries functional benefits and status, and yet its handed to Nazis when they get un banned. Hacking Into Blogger Private Blogs Tumblr' title='Hacking Into Blogger Private Blogs Tumblr' />Matt Navarra, director of social media at The Next Web, credits screencaps of this new potentially Twitter ruining feature to someone named Devesh Logendran, whom hes also credited for shots of several alleged upcoming Facebook features. Twitter declined to comment about the supposed feature. But such a feature would not be out of character for a service constantly reinventing how to ruin itself. While Im not against tweetstorming, and have in fact encouraged it, there are certain strategies to it, and certain difficulties. How someone approaches these difficulties provides crucial context for the value of the tweetstorm. The U. S. president, for example, rarely manages to thread his own tweetstorms. In 2. 01. 6, after killing blogs dead, Twitter considered massively expanding its character limitor,Read more Read. Context clues abound. Does the user know how many tweets theyll send Does the hundredth tweet deliver on the promises of the first, or does the thread spill out, like over noticed political consultant Eric Garlands, into a rambling mess Does the writer compose each tweet as a standalone unit, fit for retweeting, or do they break off in the middle of sentences, proving that they should have put their rant on Medium instead, but chose Twitter because theyre desperate to have every sentence likedUnder the model depicted in TNWs screenshots, these signifiers would disappear. Twitter, says TNW, would automatically split a block of text into multiple tweets, then attach a clean parenthetical count to each. The storm would approach and dump its contents, just a long essay poorly broken up into tweets, calling attention to just how weird and dumb a tweetstorm can appear, while simultaneously wiping away the organic markers of the writers unhinged approach. Of course, users will always have the choice to tweetstorm the old fashioned way. The real danger is what new horrors the users will achieve with the feature. Most of the existing features only ruined Twitter because of their unintended consequences. What can spammers, hoaxers, and Nazis achieve with this new toolProbably more than the well behaved users, who just want a nice place to put one sentence at a time.