In The Celebrity Apprentice’s season finale, just six days after Trump’s first tweet, more Americans would elect to watch Desperate Housewives and Cold Case.īut the transformation played out slowly, at least for the internet. His appearance on Letterman was an attempt to stanch the bleeding. The celebrity spin-off that Trump was promoting was still on the air, but its ratings were also plummeting. While he would later talk about it as a top-rated show, The Apprentice had actually fallen from its early prime-time heights to the 75th most watched show, before being put on hiatus. Although he had successfully rebranded himself as a reality-tele- vision host, that shine was starting to wear off. The 63-year-old real estate magnate had just suffered his fourth bankruptcy when Trump Entertainment Resorts (the holding company for his casinos, hotels, and Trump Marina) collapsed under a $1.2 billion debt and banished him from the executive board. People were using social media for something new, to experience the news together online. The platform’s traffic surged to a record 100,000 tweets per hour before its servers crashed. Millions of people turned to the social network to mourn, reflect, and speculate. Pop music’s irreplaceable loss, however, proved Twitter’s gain. His passing convulsed the internet in grief. A few weeks after Trump’s first tweet, superstar entertainer Michael Jackson died. But it would be driven by a different celebrity. Now with 18 million users spread around the world, the startup was on the brink of a revolutionary success. Just a few years earlier, Twitter had begun as a way for groups of friends to share their “status” via text message updates. Yet beneath the inanity, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like were hurtling toward a crossroads-one that would soon see them thrust into the center of civic life and global politics.
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