i picked one up and it wouldn't let me put it down. i brought it to the conference and i was the only one other than andy who has the latest technology but we were the only two with ipads that the conference and i had a google alert for my name, pops up when someone mentions the and i started seeing all these things on twitter and people kept saying sanho tree has and i had, what next? it had something to do with what i was going to say. people were talking about me on twitter, must be a valid medium, better look into and i have been at it ever since. it is true in can be very frivolous. i confess i have pleaded meals and things like that, pictures of things i have beaten, my cat has become quite famous. whoever talked about old technology like telegraph and

fax and contrast with technology today, today we have a smart phone and we use it to look at cat videos. it also has a tremendous upside in terms of potential for social change that we are barely beginning to learn about and some of the pioneers in this are worthy of mention, one of my favorites is a friend of mine who works at media matters now, handle is go angelo. stop bollenbach . he was a law student -- you is concerned about glenn beck and all the distortion and he took twitter and build up 20,000 followers on twitter and what he did along with color of change started a campaign to get glenn

beck fixed off of fox news and he studied each of the advertisers who advertise on glenn beck's show and said direct message would you mind following me for a moment i want to explain what i am doing and explain we are not asking you to drop fox altogether but stop advertising on glenn beck's show because here's a record of things he has misrepresented causing a lot of harm to society and the corporation was foolish enough to ignore angelo he would go public with his twitter and the corporate handles of those corporations, basically got thousands of his followers to express their own outrage at these corporations for continuing to advertise on glenn beck's show. by the end of the campaign he knocked off 300 advertisers from glenn beck's show. in the u.k. they knocked off all of the advertisers, can only show internal fox adds and the advertising rates were fraction

of the other fox shows. so fox did the economical thing and got ready of -- got rid of him that there is tremendous potential here. to think back words, those who are older might react more viscerally. if i offered you a core is beer and you are a liberal or moderately liberal alan react. that brand is poisonous and will continue to be poisonous decades but it has been over for longtime. here is what gets interested, social media skews younger and brand loyalty skews young and the intersection gives us tremendous power because if you poison the brand and get a brand associated with homophobia, racism, that becomes a toxic brand that sticks with people the rest of their lives or for a long time. we have a lot of freebie's when you enter college, free deodorant and this and that.

why do they give you free stuff. and how many decades have you use the same detergent or so? and it lasts throughout their life. that is why there's so much programming on television and freebies for young people because your brand loyalties haven't been established and you hope to get some market share out of that. there are a lot of economic thoughts and if you combine it with social media, and that is -- a viral advocacy. it is a tremendously revolutionary forum, very democratizing. i worked on policy on my day job and i send out news feeds at 11:00 and 4:00 eastern time, a series of news articles every

day space five minutes apart. maybe 2 dozen articles, and wire service following me and all these bureaucrats following me and activists but when they see this deluge of stories day after day, every single day about critical of the war on drugs. and they're not working and can't ignore it. it allows you to communicate very directly, so that i can talk to journalists directly. and shape their reporting and they contact me as a result of that and same with bureaucrats and idb did the u.n. drug czar, easy to strike up a conversation in a way you couldn't do with e-mail and with how many

followers you have they don't want to ignore you, more willing to engage. the tremendous upside of this. there are down sides however and we need to be cognizant, it is a dangerous new world. and more about facebook can youtube and other social media. and in college i did a lot of activism on central america and thinking back to el salvador in the 1980s when they were killing tens of thousands of people dragging them out of their homes, torturing them, dumping their bodies. in those days in looking for leftist subversives union organizers, community activists and could tortured people and the name they would get out of them might be accurate, torture them and get more people rounded up but nowadays, facebook

accounts for instance, your likes become your death warrant in many ways so that if you are in a conflict zone like syria or colombia or honduras where the oligarchs are paying people you can have a couple facebook accounts, do some diagrams and figure out quickly to the subversives are in any given country so people in syria have been dragged out of their homes and disappeared based on youtube comments or other comments on social media. witter's less dangerous because there is a disclaimer in their bio, these tweets denied equal endorsement but with other social media we need to be careful what we are saying and to whom we are saying it. if you live in a part of the world where your frequency is not guaranteed it could be a liability. those are the upside and downside of twitter. i will leave it at that and have

it in the q&a. a [applause] >> this is my first panel in terms of world affairs, happy to be here. >> you have to have it right up to your face. >> i first found out about twitter in 2009, and it was kind of wary, not really into social me yet at that time. i was living in damascus and the reason i signed up was because there was mass protests kicked off in iran and the way to follow what happens i quickly learned because news was telling us this, to follow it on

twitter. twitter was still not a threat to the syrian government, facebook was bought and twitter wasn't so i signed up and watch these things coming through from people in tehran and other cities and the title of this at that moment captured to me the freedom and frivolity because in signing up at least at that time asked if i wanted to sign up to my friends or whenever i did, so most of them were people saying how much they like hot dogs and things like this, and i hate this. just kind of watched it and paid attention to iran and a couple months later i became a prisoner in iran and talk about other panels, was kind of off the map,

in prison for two years and with a lot of those activists actually in a political prison. coming out one of the things that happens in prison is the kind of a time warp. you -- your reference point to the world is when you go in and the world goes very fast and suddenly twitter was important. especially as a journalist, in a lot of other areas, this kind of unstated rule that your social clout is measured in twitter followers and it was suddenly an important thing for news and was heavily used in the arabs spring. i was still noticing it was kind of the same by gary. it was still mostly frivolous. the most followed on twitter is

justin beaver, has more followings than the president of the united states. after getting out, i read a lot about what had been happening in the rest of the middle east, was watching it in prison by the iranian state media lens, and i realized the use of twitter in the west was quite exaggerated in my opinion. i think the west often takes credit in some way for massive events happening in the world and this is one of them. but i also think that twitter was important in a certain way, less so than the way it was being talked about as an organizing tool. i think twitter shaped a narrative and created cohesion in a region that is very large

and involves many countries. in tunisia for example where the arabs spring kicked off, there were riots, and riots in tunisia were not that uncommon before this and not only in tunisia but egypt also. the difference now is people were starting to reference it and people in other countries that referencing it in twitter and have these hash tag with the dates like jan 25 or whatever. very quickly there was this regionwide conversation where people were connecting directly to each other, was not really possible before. the e mediacy created this sense the yemenis were following bahrain, different connections were happening and it was a

sense of one movement. ultimately the importance of twitter and the use of it, the important use is a reporting tool. at its use in iran, people reporting what is happening as it happens which is important internally but also important for getting of the word out. in the middle east they often tweet in english because they are tweeting to the world and then kind of larger media is watching twitter and reporting on it. an example that i watched where twitter played a role in a situation that had to do with freedom and also reporting.

this guy who was kind of an environmental activist involved in the earth liberation front spent time in prison for arson and in his time in prison was held in a federal solitary confinement unit which also houses prisoners, other people would kind of politically -- some political motive. he was recently released from prison. after his release he wrote a blood for the huffington post which a lot of people do, and he talked about this new evidence that had come out about his case which basically proved that he was put in solitary confinement for political speech. i think it was two pour three days after he made his blog post he was rearrested and i found

out about this on twitter because his lawyers, he is engage in a lawsuit related to his imprisonment and represented by and human-rights legal group called center for constitutional rights which i follow and they treated he had been arrested, they thought it was because of his blog posts and i read about prisons a lot so i treated about this and other people did and quickly this narrative, very quickly unfolded and then someone from the huffington post picked this up and wrote about it and kind of got into the larger fear of me and the next day he was released because it turned out the law that was used, actually was a law and to look up years ago where you could -- you were not allowed as a federal prisoner to rights

under a byline, you can't write for public consumption basically. that law had been declared unconstitutional in 2010. in part because of this kind of attention, he got out. which i think is really in some ways typical use of twitter at least in the kinds of media realm which is how i deal with it like san jose, i follow people who are sometimes activists, sometimes part of organizations, that are kind of doing this work and it quickly shoots kind of ladder and becomes a story. so i will leave it at that. >> we will hear from robert.

thank you. thank you, and was hoping -- led robert round the stop and chat questions and come to you. >> thank you very much. when shane bauer 11 made the observation lady gaga has more twitter followers than the president of the united states i was reminded of the old story, babe ruth was in an argument with the owner of the team. i am not sure, this is before he was traded from the red sox to the yankees and he said i should get this, i am worth it and the owner said what do you want? he said $100,000. the owner said $100,000? that is more than the president of the united states makes and babe ruth's that i had a better year than the president of the united states. we will leave it at that.

we are glad we are getting a chance to talk about twitter. i find myself using twitter in a number of different ways. as a journalist, as a journalist i found twitter has replaced what was once the essential tool in the trade, the ap newswire. beck in the old days reporters would check the wire to find out what was happening close by, the united states, across the world, checking every few minutes, particularly assignment editors in major newspapers would be checking the wire to find out what they needed. now you don't need that.

twitter gives you that and twitter give that to everybody, not just journalists. if you or somebody who is nervous about tweeting feeling is not quite for you but wants to find out what is going on you can follow cnn's twitter feed, fox's twitter feed, you can follow andrea mitchell if you want, you can follow sean and eddie if you want. there are a whole lot more people popping up in who don't work for the major news organizations but they are also putting out information turns that into an early-warning system for many of the professional journalists out there. a couple people said because twitter, because people are

everywhere and because there was a statistic that was released a few in weeks ago that said in the developing world, a lot more people feel it more important to have a cellphones and running water. that means those individuals are able, because there are different ways you can sweet and so forth you don't have to have a smart phone per se. if you have but general phone with instant message or so forth you can sweet, you can get into the conversation. innocence, that has democratized the information flow. it also allows a feedback loop for journalists because somebody can say you reported this but i live across the street and you

got the address wrong. if you are a journalist, in a sense it certainly made your job harder because you don't just have the few proofreaders in your newspaper or your news organization. you have got thousands if not millions of people able to call you on your stuff if you have the basic facts wrong. the flat side of that is trolls who decides to cyberstock you in different ways just to make your life miserable. that is actually part of freedom as well. if you are a media person, a public figure, twitter allows them to read what you put out and criticize you whether fairly

or unfairly. shane bauer also mentioned twitter is something of a good crowd sorcerer in a way. if you are a journalist and if you want to lead on a particular story, looking for an expert you can send out a request and the odds are that somebody following you will say is this person knows this, that person knows that, that is always a great way of assisting you if you are trying to track down a story. before i was a journalist i worked on capitol hill for republican organizations and republican members of congress. that made me sort of unprofessional political observer as a years have gone by and i find this is where the frivolity aspect of twitter comes in.

what is ultimately a beneficial way. we are in an increasingly partisan and ideological age. one of the interesting things about twitter is part of the frivolous aspect of it, someone breaks down the hard core ideology. for example one of the people i follow partly because i want to find out what he is saying because it is interesting is a guy by the name of oliver willis. he works for media matters which is a left of center media checking sight. i disagree, most of what i have to say. it is interesting that oliver like me as a big-time comic book nerd. if you go to his twitter page,

great illustration of superman breaking down something and so forth, occasionally tweet about comic books or get into these mean hash tag games and stuff like that. that is not going to change my opinion of what he is saying in terms of an ideological point of view but makes me see him in a different right as a human being with varied interests and in fact one of the best way is that i discovered makes this a rather fascinating topic, a person who tweets under the name of dark andrea, not a well-known person at all but there was something going on a year or two ago that had to do with a comic book discussion and i use the search engine on twitter to follow

everybody who put in a hash tag and followed the discussion and stumbled across this woman and there was a debate about that girl or whatever. i thought i would follow her because she had interesting observations. these are the things i learned because she started having discussions with other things that had nothing to do with comic books but she is in my time line i find this out about her. i find out dark andrea is a lesbian, married in ohio, has two kids, they live on a farm and dilator find out she is a hard-core libertarian.

this is the thing. breaking down the electorate, going into a presidential race, the average reporter, the best political reporter out there would not have been able to find this person. it completely and totally breaks down the idea because you are all women or because of your race or sexual orientation or whatever you are supposed to be thinking this way or have this lifestyle, those people are out there, and twitter starts to revealed that. i found this out because of the, quote, frivolous aspect of twitter. because i am following a conversation on comic books and end up following it. that is the idea, tweeting for

freedom or frivolity sets up, to use one of the president's favorite phrases, it falls short. and the pursuit of a political goal or revolution. is absolutely important, essentials and so forth but ultimately if you think of it, frivolity is what makes us human. the ability to be free and have conversations about sports and knitting and comic books and looking at the kids's soccer games, that is part of freedom as well. the frivolity is part of the freedom and twitter is a great pull revealed that to everybody. [applause] >> a quick check-in at the table and i will invite those of you who have questions to bring them

to the center microphone. you could start moving that direction right now and i will get to you shortly. any of you from willow down to sanho tree, reflections in the like to offer before we invite the rest of the room to speak with you? >> crowd sourcing and twitter, it is remarkable. one of the places where it is most clearly visible is with comedy and aspiring comedians. when things go viral they go viral like you wouldn't believe. think about young jerry seinfeld doing the circuit for a decade playing all these obscure clubs hoping some producers somewhere in the back of the audience might take notice and give him a shot at a bigger venue and possibly a show. nowadays if you are really talented and smart and or even young you can rise to the top very quickly based on how many reach week you and your talent comes to the top very best. >> i cut myself off a little bit

because i am coming up against the time but i didn't want to mention that a little bit, how at -- sanho tree said twitter is a great wave your a comic of getting your stuff out there but it also has created its own humorous style, particularly in hash tag jokes where somebody will set up something like suspicious children's books titles. that will be the hash tag, someone will tweet something like horton hears a whole and so you start getting these and it changes those that the punchline is in the hash tag itself and other people are supplying the other part of the joke and it is a completely different way, a

completely different type of humor. >> anything from willow? crowd sourcing, freedom to move, political information, direct democracy, the end of the ap, where do you want to go to work? and if you would please give me your name if this is your first time here and ask the question please. tell me how many times have you been here? and your name? >> as someone on the political left, most all of the political actions engaged in through social media have been -- >> we can't hear. get really close. >> without catching. >> is not on.

>> is set on? >> wants to come up here? >> it was turned off. >> am i on now? okay. has someone on the political left i am pleased that most all of social me the at actions have been left wing actions that i have heard of. my question is can we expect that we will see the political right, the tea party or their religious right start leveraging social media in the future or another way of putting it is do we believe the social media is inherently politically left as a tool or politically neutral as a pull? >> i think i would disagree with your premise. i would say there was a whole lot of social media involved in the tea party movement.

that is just a fact. there are folks on the conservative side who do notice it seems that particularly in 2008 and also in 2012 with the obama campaign that the left was more organized on social me the at that time and figuring out why that is. but the right is very much involved on twitter. particularly, one of their favorite francs actually is pra there's a certain hash tag from the democratic side conservatives will try and hijacked the hash tag to get out

their own counter talking points. >> others from the panel? >> i had a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago who works for twitter and i was asking him how people in twitter talk about their role in the arabs spring, how much response ability, and this question that comes up with the internet in general, especially with twitter right now which is is it inherently democratic? i would say it is not. i think what happens in the middle east, there is a time lag sometimes with technology where certain people get them first but others catch up. twitter is now starting to advertise a lot, inside twitter, that is one of their big pushes

internally, like facebook does or anything, it depends who is using it and it can be blocked also like other things. >> i think you are not following the right people. >> we all need to follow people. is important to follow the other side. if you one people to stop doing what they're doing you have to understand why they're doing it and very often our conceptions about why they are doing things may not be the same as the reason they think they're doing things so we need policies that engage them on that level. >> if you're going to do that bring your xanax. it is really depressing to follow people, sanho tree is right. i often find myself having to on follow people from different political angels for exactly that reason because otherwise i

will have a coronary and drop dead. is a lot of information from people you disagree with. >> thank you for the question. >> i will throw in just one other element. you can also -- twitter allows you to breakdown the folks that you follow in 2 different lists so if -- you have got your main twitter feed, everybody you follow, if you want to break it out. for example, i have got different lists on conservatives i may want to follow, liberals i may want to follow, comedians, international media members, things pertaining to new york city and so forth. once you have got your list if you want to say i want to know what people are talking about and have a background in new york city politics, you can do that and look at that list as

you wish. >> first time? how many times have you been here? >> packer, my fourth time here, i don't go to a lot of class. >> spending every year at the conference of world affairs. >> my question is to the whole panel but based on miss wilson's quote, talking about how twitter supports freedom in general and governments in particular have a difficult time controlling this waterworld, the example of egypt in 2005 that many individuals have pointed to china as a place that has done particularly well, controlling its twitter equivalence so i was wondering if you could comment on whether the success is sustainable. >> the china journalism experts at the table? >> i know a small bit about the

golden shield's, the massive kent the chinese government erected over in the internet and it does seem like a lot of the time, and because it is so easy when it is difficult to access things on the internet because of don't put in a whole lot of effort to get their so there's the vibrant hacker community in china, but for the average person who is not necessarily all that politically involved or have political interest but not a lot of interest in getting together with those people who share their interests or getting that information it might not be worth it to make the effort to reach those fail saves the government put in place. that sort of, there is up passivity built into the internet on some level. it is easy to get stuff.

when it becomes less easy instead of finding a way to access the information we don't make any effort, we say we can't -- of the new york times put up a payroll, stop reading new york times articles rather than making the effort or paying the money. but its seams, north korea is another great example of successful internet censorship. government's getting more savvy about governments in general but specifically ones that have a vested interest in controlling the population's access to information, they are getting more clever about how to limit people's access not only to particular sights on the internet but also internet access in general. so i think that is probably going to be a big factor in the next ten years or so in terms of how we look at propaganda, cyberwarfare and all these things because they things that

were true five or six years ago when social media was the new thing and to get rid of them you had to unload the internet has happened in egypt during the revolution. that is rapidly changing. probably if one had to repeat the same thing, if you want to do the same thing in another five years in a place like tunisia or egypt or libya you probably have, much harder time because the people who are interested in living people's access to the internet are learning from these incidences even as we are learning to use technology better so it is going to be an interesting decade in terms of internet security for sure. >> specific thinking -- >> nieces and nephews growing up in china and go to international school and for teenagers there are lots of ways to get around a

great fire wall and they know how to do that. i don't know about average chinese, how easy it is that there is an assumption that somehow chinese people need to be on our social media and platforms. the u.s. has three hundred million people, that if you add 1 billion, that is china, why would they want to be on a platform based in another country, another culture, other customers, why is there a knee-jerk assumption they ought to be on our platform? if the russians developed a really neat social media software program would you gravitate toward that or do something native to your culture and country. what most people use twitter and social media for chinese people like just as happy to read about chinese food or chinese cats as any other platform.

>> the chinese food -- >> i forgot where i was. i apologize. >> anybody else have a followup? thank you so much. introduce yourself and tell us how many times you have been here. >> i am a five years senior and this is my fifth time. >> thanks for being here. >> only five more weeks. 9 is more about twitter usage for you all as opposed to fairly political usage of twitter. i have been a logger for about a year. you are established a little different from you all compared to someone just starting out and isn't as established as you are but what have you found to be the most effective usage of twitter, what trends have you

used for seen others use to get your message and information out there? >> any recommendations? >> if you read tweet other people they take notice of the land may follow you, that is a good way to build more twitter followers so i try to do that in terms of advocacy. i will read tweet other people and include their handles so they can build up more followers if you're trying to do advocacy and build a movement but it is also good for social relations. like the monkeys that room each other. >> if you have been blogging on something of a political nature, whatever source and you want to tweet out that link if it is of

the conservative nature you can use a hash tag, top conservatives on twitter, the left version of that is hash tag p2. if somebody is on twitter and want to search for conservatives, what they're talking about they can put in a hash tag and zero in on a bunch of other conservatives and do the same thing for pete 2 if they are on the left. it is not a bad idea to track what kind of hash tag far out there and put those in your tweet as well to get some random people who might otherwise not know what you might be writing about. >> any other personal experiences you would like to share? how best to use twitter. no? thank you so much.

>> hello. >> my name is ryan. this is my fourth year here. my first -- that is four. i want to ask about twitter. one criticism i have of it personally if it has a very short attention span. an example i want to give is of local one for me. i was in new york during hurricane sandy. during the hurricane itself is invaluable. all line on the leading twitter friends were there that weekend but when it came to the issues sandy brought up that were more complex, longer lasting, twitter was useless. went back to a post from the daily news and the times was a much more valuable resources for issues like not having power two months later. my question is not for anyone specific but for the panel. is that not a problem with twitter that its focus is so much on the moment? >> should we expect more than

just the moment? >> part of what twitter does is distribution pull. a lot of -- i like reading long things really. i don't like reading this minute by minute stuff all the time. there are two main uses of twitter for me. one is for ongoing conversations and those that not necessarily conversations between me and someone else but an issue that is developing to watch what is happening and what the conversation is and it is useful for that because it makes these little my new news items become part of a bigger story and i also use it, a lot of people use it to send links to other things and it is very useful for that, to kind of have this short list of what is the most substantial,

where you can click on and go to that more substantial thing and see the headlines or whatever and comment on those longer pieces or whatever is. >> i think that is right. every information resource, every information tool has a certain advantage or certain disadvantage. obviously the newspaper for example, any newspaper can get into a story on a deeper level than a minute and a half story on the local news. what you said is correct. twitter is great for in terms of journalistic sense, it is great for breaking news, it is great for giving eyewitness accounts for people in different places but it is not a substitute for

those who are going to give greater backgrounds to a situation. obviously you want to have people in iran war on the streets of cairo or to nietzsche just to give you a sense what is happening at that moment, but you are going to need people who are going to put all of that into a bigger picture for the second day story, the week after, the month after and so forth. twitter can be used for links to those stories as well but it is not going to be -- you can only get so much out of the nation to a 140 characters. you do get certain people just like when blogging started to rise, people were obsessed about one topic, you do have people focused on one topic and they

will tweet about that particular issue or topic on a daily basis, you can get information from that as well. >> there's another aspect. much like facebook with liking stuff, people will be like i have reached we did this, i have done my duty for hurricane sandy or whatever and that is the end of the thought. if there is one serious downside it is that it is easy to feel you have done your job by hitting 3 tweets and helping whoever it is get their message out, that is the way you help the cause so there is that element of armchair activism that might make people complacent, twitter, their social responsibility begins and ends, at the bare bones beginning and to make anything real happen you have to get off of twitter and go out in the

street so that is certainly a downside you have experienced firsthand. >> the shallowness of twitter, sound bites in our culture tends to get a lot of disrespect, doesn't get the respect it deserves because if you think about how wisdom used to be passed on in a tree literature society, the industrial province where my family comes from in china where confucius' came from a jim furyk indy of 2500 years ago when this people didn't read how did you pass on was in? through the oral tradition and proverbs so there are cheesy sound bites like axes of evil which don't teach you anything and did is not something that rhyme and are stupid but also teaching sound bites, teaching proverbs at really good twitter accounts know how to be concise and boil down the essence of an idea and pass that on. i love following things like yiddish proverb says or african proverbs.

i wish someone would start one with confucius proverbs because it is a great way to pass on nuggets of information. >> there probably is one out there. >> what do you do in your spare time? anybody else, how are got another question out there? what was the most surprising tweak you ever received? ever had something that was how -- what were if they thinking i was going to do with that? is there anything that hit a boundary line or has it all been pretty mainstream, useful? >> when asked me a couple months ago if i was going to start a militia. i still don't know why. i treated him up question mark. he after the same question again. i am going to back away from that. >> thanks for the suggestion the >> things don't make sense or how many verbs or nouns are in them, i tend to ignore those but

there is one favorite tweet of mine that embodies the brilliance of twitter ended was from a former participant, tweeting about the egyptian revolution and the election and her tweet was something like egypt, the day of the election, egypt, 5,000 years, democracy finally, thank you egypt, down with marsmarsi! it was from the heart and brilliant. >> i am not sure i really have a good response because sometimes you get a tweet that is so slight go and out there, you just sort of roll your eyes and move on.

occasionally as i mentioned before you get the cyberstalking type or the person still obsesses about something that you just have to block them or something like that. i can't think of one -- >> i can't take one but i remember when i got back on twitter after i got in prison, first there was one tweet after i published my first, this guy said congratulations on your first troll. i like that. but also when i went back on twitter i would get a lot of tweets of people just saying welcome home, welcome back. it was like something in my pocket that was constantly people reminding me welcome back. that was awesome. >> acquistion?

>> my name is caitlin, this is my first twa. my question is for everybody, it starts with an assumption that communications creates a certain relationship between people who are involved in it so there's a certain intimacy to writing a letter, take the care of writing and putting it in the mail and broadcast media are sort of anonymous and so on. i wonder if you have any thoughts about what kind of human relationship exists between the people who are participating in the communication on twitter. >> thank you, willow has to walk to the next session. >> thank you. >> back to the relationship of communication. >> there was a hustle recently

with people from anonymous. they are anonymous so i don't know who they are, the real anonymous for someone pretending to be anonymous. they were launching a cyberattacks on north korea and warned them this is kind of volatile and it is not a typical country and they don't respond to the same coercion you might use in other countries and some hard-liners probably don't know who anonymous is in north coriander face a it is an attack from the south you could be sparking something but it is hard to have a back-and-forth with someone who is anonymous. >> most people i follow or follow me are not people i really have actual relationships in the physical world, that is true in social media in general.

>> i have become friends, if you call it that, with people on twitter and it is not like facebook, people went to high school or college or worked with and united in social media. and they agree on politics or fervently disagree on politics, we have civil discussions and learn and it goes, talking about

obama care, having a discussion about the new york rangers were something like that. and more in common than just the political. we don't necessarily talk about kids or sometimes we do or what the situation is. it allowed me and a broader meaning, these may not be my best friends by consider them friends and i have actually -- followers on twitter. >> i truly appreciate your comments about the fact that you have bridged a lot of different points of view by following

people and having different profiles on twitter and that is something, the relationship of you to your communities. >> battle social media joke, facebook is where you live to your closest friends and family and twitter is where you are brutally honest to thousands of complete strangers around the world. >> i find myself much more on twitter than facebook. and there's importance of time putting out, i don't feel this need to plant the seed as i did with when it was the thing. >> anybody closing? give us how to follow you. >> my twitter handle

is@robgeorge. >> shane_bauer. >> you can follow me on sanho tree or grinder -- never mind. if you have to ask, forget it. >> too much information. >> what is that? if you lump them together? was the first name and last name together? sanho tree. and the bios are in our booklet. if you have not found one they should be in the hallway. i want to thank everybody for sitting with us and listening. i hope you are all learning to write really fun things to describe your place in the world. thanks so much. we have a few minutes to visit. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> what would the world be like

if the southern confederacy was on the southern border of the united states of america. think for a minute of the united states from baltimore all the way down through florida along the gulf coast at the end of texas that would be foreign territory, would not be part of the united states. in fact the united states would have no real access to ec atlantic or the caribbean except for a narrow path from baltimore north as far as boston. not very good harbors anyway so all of a sudden the great atlantic coast of the united states is narrowed down to a point where it can easily be blockaded, everything has to be funneled through. doesn't mean the united states would collapse of its own weight. it means the united states would no longer have anywhere near the presence in the western hemisphere in terms of dealing with intervention or french

intervention. >> roger ransom this weekend as booktv and american history tv look at the history of literary life of palm springs, calif.. today at noon eastern on c-span2's booktv and sunday at 5:00 on c-span3's american history tv. .. >> tv is live from book expo america in new york city. book expo america is an annual trade show for the publishing inst