President Obama Has 20 Aides Just to Manage His Twitter and Facebook Accounts

No, Obama didn’t Tweet that.

And he didn’t launch that Facebook page, either.

One of his 20 hip and trendy young aides who work in the Office of Digital Strategy did.

Sure, the president is a superficially busy guy (fundraisers, press conferences, photo ops, more fundraisers, shaking hands with heads of state, doing what he’s told, fundraisers), but… his Twitter account, something that is supposed to be so simple it’s 140 characters or less, takes not just one dedicated employee, but a whole team of them.

That’s right. We are to the point in modern society where the President of the United States has a team of nearly two dozen people whose sole job is to ghost posts to his official Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube accounts.

Just let that sink in for a second…

“What do you do for a living?”

“I ghost Tweet for President Obama.”

You have to wonder how it works in that office. Does someone have an idea and run over to confer with the others and someone else edits the Tweet and someone else approves it to be sent out?

Jason Goldman, chief digital officer of the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, makes $140,000 a year running this team, just by the way.

The New York Times reported, “The goal is to bring a sense of spontaneity and accessibility to one of the world’s most choreographed and constricted positions.”

But Obama isn’t even sending out his own Tweets, so how is that any less choreographed and packaged than everything else about him?

Here’s just one example of how the “army of social media specialists” in the president’s digital spin room exploit major media events to push Obama’s political agenda.

Remember this? Via the NYT:

As the Internet exploded recently with the story of the 14-year-old Muslim boy arrested for taking a homemade clock that was mistaken for a bomb to his school in Texas, President Obama’s small army of social media specialists wasted no time.

From their office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Mr. Obama’s aides determined that the president should swiftly tweet about the clockmaker, Ahmed Mohamed, whose distraught expression and handcuffed wrists were feeding a national debate about ethnic and religious profiling.

And from that, the nation got:

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015

And what happens when someone sends a threatening Tweet @POTUS’ way?

Well then a dedicated Secret Service team known as the Internet Threat Desk hunts them down, shows up at their house, and knocks on the door.

The growing digital bureaucracy ala [amazon text=1984&asin=0451524934]. It’s the new jobs economy.