Bernie Sanders offends Romanians on Twitter

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http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/romanians-make-fun-bernie-sanders-internet-tweet-37367452

From across the ocean, Bernie Sanders has managed to offend a good number of Romanians.

A Romanian travel agency on Thursday offered Sanders airline tickets to visit the country as residents alternately mocked or felt hurt by the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, who said Romania had faster Internet than the U.S.

Sanders had criticized the low Internet speed in the U.S. in a Twitter post Wednesday.

"Today, people living in Bucharest, Romania, have access to much faster Internet than most of the US. That's unacceptable and must change," he posted.



Romanians reacted strongly Thursday, with some making fun of him and others saying they were offended. One Twitter user urged the U.S. to scrap visa requirements for Romanians so the country's engineers could travel to the U.S. to fix its Internet problem.

Another created a new campaign poster for Sanders, who is trailing Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton: "Make America's Internet speed great again: Invade Romania!"

Others were merely offended at Sander's assumptions. One Twitter user wrote that it sounded like Sanders feels Americans are "entitled to being better than everyone else," calling that attitude "very disrespectful."

The travel agency Paravion.ro offered Sanders tickets to "come over and experience our great Internet. You can tweet unlimited. Bring a friend, plane tickets are on us!"
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I'm very confused, why they are offended?
 
I also don't get why this is offensive since it is true that some Americans can only afford Dial-up internet because it is cheapest while Faster internet like DSL, Cable, Fibre, ISDN, T3, 4G LTE, etc are far more expensive. Plus, the local government does not try to convince a company like Comcast, Google Fiber, and Time Warner to connect their town to broadband internet, so they can have faster choices in Internet instead of only slower Dial-up internet service.

I think the ideal internet would be where all internet users have faster 1-10 Gbps internet service with unlimited bandwidth like Google Fiber internet, and affordable priced internet like $10 a month or less, and $5 a month for poorer users.
 
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Demon_Skeith said:
Yes, and he is saying that other countries have better net than us. What is wrong with that? Spell it out please.
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No, he is not saying that "other countries" have better internet than the US. He is singling out a country, and the way he said it implies that Romania is inferior to the USA and he finds it unacceptable that an inferior country has superior technological advancements. Also, the end of his tweet is confusing: what is unacceptable? What must change? The fact that Romania has good internet or the fact that the US doesn't? Why didn't he use a country with better internet than Romania (such as South Korea or Japan) as a reference?

And talk about lack of diplomacy... When was the last time you've seen a Romanian politician complain that another country in particular has something better than Romania? The way he worded it out came out as disrespectful to millions of Romanians, as it can be seen by the replies he got on Twitter. It's one thing to say, "hey, other people have something cool and I don't. I want a cool thing like that too." and a whole different thing to say, "it's unacceptable that those particular people have something that I don't and it must change".

It was all over the news around here. They even made a website to mock him: http://berniespeedtest.com

froggyboy604 said:
I also don't get why this is offensive since it is true
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Truth tends to offend if worded out badly.
 
alakazam said:
And talk about lack of diplomacy... When was the last time you've seen a Romanian politician complain that another country in particular has something better than Romania? The way he worded it out came out as disrespectful to millions of Romanians, as it can be seen by the replies he got on Twitter. It's one thing to say, "hey, other people have something cool and I don't. I want a cool thing like that too." and a whole different thing to say, "it's unacceptable that those particular people have something that I don't and it must change".
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First, I would like to say that I am not particularly a big fan of Bernie.

With that said, I think it is being taken the wrong way. I am quite sure he meant it is unacceptable that leaders in the United States have not kept up with technological advancements such as high speed internet like other countries have. I don't think he intended it to come off as being unacceptable that Romania has better internet than the U.S. (and therefore implying it should have worse). I do see how it could be taken the other way though, too, as you said. As for why he didn't use another country like Japan or South Korea, nearly every comment he makes seem to center around European countries. He seems to be particularly fond of Denmark and Finland.
 
Bernie Sanders is saying good things about Romania's internet speed, so I think he was not insulting Romania. But, he was insulting the US and Internet Companies like Comcast for not working together at creating a faster US internet network which performs at usable speed like 20 Mbps or faster for all users, so people can stream multiple HD video while downloading large files in a shorter amount of time.

I think Bernie is frustrated that large US companies like Comcast, and the government can't work faster together at improving the US's internet speeds while countries with less resources can create a reliable and fast running internet.

Bernie Sanders says a lot of Socialist things about income inequality between the poor and the rich when I see news stories about him. I think Bernie Sanders pick Romania because Romania is more socialist, and not as capitalist like Japan and South Korea where the job creators and very talented artist, and educated workers like Kpop singers, Movie Actors, Software Developers, etc earn the most of the money while the poor and less educated workers like fast food workers earn a lot less money from their hard work.

There are not many well known Socialist countries with fast Internet, so Bernie Sanders does not have a lot of choices in Socialist countries with fast internet, or a strong economy where everyone makes a fair wage from their hard work.
 
I think Bernie Sanders used the wrong social network to post his message because Twitter only limits users to only 140 characters which is not enough characters to fully explain America's problem with slow internet for many people who don't have fast internet like Google Fiber.

Bernie Sanders could of posted a picture, or a link of how America's internet speeds are not fast and reliable by modern standards like Google Fiber's fast speed and great reliability.

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Medium, and Tumblr may of been a better choice for posting a larger post with more paragraphs and pictures about how America's internet is not improving fast enough.
 
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