You'll Never Tweet as Well as This Texas Judge

From Texas Standard:

By order of the 84th Texas Legislature, Justice Don Willett has just become our official “Tweeter Laureate.”

He may be a judge on the Supreme Court of this state, but in his spare time online, Justice Willett has posted nearly 17,000 tweets, and he has more than 18,000 followers.

So what makes the judge so popular online? Well, in a killer pun on breakfast cereal, he’s called his own tweets “magically judicious.” And his feed is filled with pictures, memes and jokes about the law.

In his typical way with words, Justice Willett says the title of Tweeter Laureate was “a lofty but lighthearted honor. I think it underscores the playfulness, but, believe me, we obscure judges need all the positive publicity we can get.”

Justice Willett’s original reason for using Twitter was not social, he says — it was political.

“For someone who has to run for reelection in a state of 27 million people, it is political malpractice not to engage smartly via social media. Social media was fairly new during my first campaign nine years ago,” he says. “But it was ubiquitous by the time I sought reelection in 2012. I believe it’s foolhardy not to harness the power of social media to boost visibility and raise awareness.”