The difference in scale is so astronomically large that using 'amplification' for both of these cases is misleading at best.
How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.
That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
Huh? Assuming only talking about USA, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers. And that's not counting their family members/guests. Twitter claims to have 40 million active US members, a claim I doubt heavily. They aren't far off.
Not all AOL subscribers participated in these boards/posting though.
In addition, you have social media boosting other social medias, Facebook, Reddit, this place, each with their own individual brand of shenanigans. You didn't have that way back when (mostly because the alternatives were just as sparse)
30 million subscribers who read the message boards? And they all took each post as seriously as they do a tweet today? I doubt it. You're also cherry picking from my comment and ignoring the parts about how amplification is different today than then, outside of the numbers scale.
Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
Not just message boards, live chat! Thousands and thousands of chat rooms, and everyone on IM, and everyone FWDing inappropriate emails around. I'm not sure how old you are or if you had AOL, but it was by far the most social internet experience I'd ever had!
Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.
How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.
That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.