Visit Donald Trump’s Twitter page on Wednesday, and you’ll be greeted with an unusual sight: A colorful cloud of balloons streams up the screen in celebration of the U.S. president’s 71st birthday. On my phone, a few of them lingered a while at the top of the screen, as if insisting on their presence. For a moment or two, they blocked off the president’s banner image—a photograph of a large crowd at one of his rallies. Forget that party, the site seemed to be saying. The real fun is on here.
This feature isn’t, of course, unique to Trump: Those celebratory balloons show up for any user who has publicly listed his or her birthday. They serve, the company has suggested, to encourage users to applaud one another much like Facebook’s own birthday notifications. And yet, where the Facebook feature really is a feature for the most part, Twitter’s birthday notifications seem far less apt. On the one hand, that awkwardness speaks to the differences between the sites, but it also gets at Twitter’s ongoing failure to really understand how its own service works.
It’s partly Trump’s own fault that the balloons feel so unlikely, so improbable, possibly even so unpleasant today. Even if, as he claims, he’s using it to “get [his] honest and unfiltered message out,” his presence on the platform feels more like an extension of his political persona than his real personhood. Whatever your own politics, you don’t follow him to find out what he’s up to or how he’s feeling so much as to learn what he might do next.
But what’s true for Trump’s Twitter mostly holds for the platform as a whole as well. While I do follow some of my real-life friends and acquaintances on the site, I don’t log on expecting to learn details about their lives—there are plenty of other venues for that. My Twitter feed is, instead, a source of collectively relevant information and analysis first—there’s nowhere better for breaking news—and a font of oddball humor second. While users sometimes introduce career changes with the phrase “Some personal news,” the site is, above all else, powerful precisely because it’s impersonal.
On Twitter, information typically arrives in aggregate. Now and then, a good joke or a cutting observation will rise above the rest, but it’s the steady flow of information from all corners that makes the site stand out. Accordingly, I rarely visit a particular user’s page, unless I’m trying to figure out who they are. In the unlikely event that it happens to be their birthday when I stop by, I’m probably not going to help them celebrate it.
That also means we’re unlikely to actually see these birthday notifications when they’re scheduled to appear, making them all the stranger when they do crop up. Where Facebook, which actively notifies you when it’s someone’s birthday, encourages you to click away from your feed to someone’s personal page, Twitter’s balloons only seem to show up if you’ve made a point of visiting their page on your own. That disjunction has never been clearer than it was on Wednesday morning for users visiting the president’s page to find out how he was reacting to breaking news of a mass shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, only to be greeted with an animated show of automated merriment:
Ultimately, of course, the balloon feature isn’t really for users, even if it appears to be. As the Verge noted when it first debuted in 2015, collecting birthday information is partly about ad targeting: The personal lives of other Twitter users may not matter much to us, but our personal lives absolutely matter to the site’s sales team. In that regard, at least, the company really is following in the footsteps of Facebook, which has long drawn on massive repositories of user data to maximize profit.
If Twitter really wants to be like Facebook, though, maybe the rest of us should try to be a little more like Slate’s Dan Kois, who used that platform’s birthday notifications as a reminder to unfriend people he didn’t actually know. On Twitter, where the notifications come less aggressively, it might be harder to figure out who to unfollow. But I, at least, can think of one powerful politician with whom we could start.
