Laura-Loomer-Twitter-Protest

Laura Loomer’s Twitter Protest Was Weird; Why Doesn’t She Own A Blog?

by

Laura Loomer’s angry with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. So much so that the 25-year-old self-described conservative investigative journalist who reportedly lives in New York, went to protest by chaining herself to Twitter’s New York City Headquarters. (Well, at least Laura didn’t fly to San Francisco where the real Twitter action is!)

The reason Laura Loomer was banned from Twitter is not the focus of my blog post. My take is she should not dive into commentary that would be seen as racist on a site she does not own. That just seems like common sense to me.

What I find rather intriguing is why she didn’t have her own self-hosted WordPress blog? Why does Laura Loomer feel compelled to make Jack Dorsey accept her way of thinking and post it on what is, at the end of the day, his site?

What I find mildly disturbing is this reliance on some to leave their expressed thoughts, feelings, and emotions in a microblog platform they don’t own, and thus have no real control over?

Many Of The Oakland Elections Candidates over-relied on Twitter, too

Laura Loomer’s right in the same place of thought as those who ran for office in Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay and where this blogger established Oakland’s first true blog Oakland Focus in 2004. The majority of candidates for Mayor of Oakland used Twitter like it was some drug, leaving long tweets and in one case getting flagged for racist tweets about black Oaklanders (something you would think gets one banned from running for Mayor of Oakland, right?).

Anyway, the leading candidate for Mayor of Oakland, the incumbent Libby Schaaf, didn’t spend much time on Twitter at all – arguably, almost no time, when the total election in Oakland’s considered. In short, there was no advantage to posting a message on Twitter that actually helped a local candidate in Oakland. Yet, that didn’t stop the majority of politicos from tweeting their hearts out, when a blog, website, and YouTube channel, combined with good old walking around and meeting people, would have been a better focus of their time.

Score: Twitter and Jack Dorsey 1 million, Laura Loomer 0

In the end, the big winner is Twitter. Jack and Biz Stone and Ev Williams have figured out the itch that everyone needs to scratch. I am just proud as anything to be able to say I was at the Twitter launch party in 2007 at Mighty Nightclub in San Francisco!

Heck, I love Twitter’s approach to microblogging, even though I really love vlogging using the ultra-fast YouTube platform via my Zennie62 on YouTube Channel.

To me, Twitter is great to use to distribute blog posts and YouTube vlogs, but I would not count on it as the repository for my message. That’s what blogs are for.

Laura Loomer was obviously born 10 years too late: otherwise she would have had her own fire-brand couch-potato conservative blog, (she’s not a real, traditional William F. Buckley Jr. conservative, you know?) rather than coming to San Francisco not for the food, but to gin up publicity for Jack’s micro-blogging platform because he kicked her off of it.

And as to this question of what good she did…

The answer is this: I’m not a hater or whatever but Laura’s mistake was in not owning and using her own self-hosted WordPress blog! Laura made no money from her protest, there was no blog that got a ton of traffic – but Jack Dorsey and Twitter sure did. #Used.

Stay tuned.