This week, President Bill Clinton stepped into the Twittersphere on political satirist Stephen Colbert’s show on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report. Comedy Central is a property of entertainment content company Viacom, Inc. (VIA). Other Viacom networks include BET, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite and about 160 more networks across the globe.
At the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting, the former U.S. president discussed poverty, foreign aid, CGI and more with host Colbert.
The two also discussed Twitter.
Clinton detailed that when he became president in 1993, email wasn’t even mainstream; it was primarily inner-office communication.
“After I became president and everybody started sending blizzards of emails within the administration, the Congress subpoenaed them all,” Clinton explained. “And all these young people, drunk with the power of the new technology, said the first thing that came into their head, so some of these emails were mildly embarrassing.”
President Clinton said that he texts and uses Facebook (FB), where he has nearly one million “likes,” but he doesn’t use other social media websites, including Twitter. He jokingly explained that he is so insecure that he’s afraid if he tweets, that maybe no one would tweet back. “There’s nothing worse than a friendless tweeter, right? You’re just wandering around in cyberspace,” said Clinton.
Colbert took the liberty of opening the former commander in chief his own Twitter account, but “PresidentClinton” and “WilliamJeffersonClinton” were already taken, so Colbert had to go with the next, best thing, “PrezBillyJeff”.
Laughingly, Clinton sent his first tweet on the account, “Just spent amazing time with Colbert! Is he sane? He is cool! #cgiu” Colbert typed and sent the tweet from his Apple (AAPL) iPhone for Clinton.
PrezBillyJeff, hasn’t yet tweeted anything else from the Twitter account, but at least he’s not walking through cyberspace alone. More than 124,000 people are already following him.
Read Next
