President Obama hosts first Twitter town hall meeting

President Obama does a lot of town hall meetings, seeing them as a chance to talk directly to voters. He did one recently on Facebook's campus, and now he's turning to Twitter.

Tomorrow at 2pm Eastern Time (7pm GMT) Obama will respond to questions sent with the hashtag #AskObama. Some of the questions at the town hall web site will be sent on the day, and some from those collected since the announcement was made, but the topic is the economy and how to improve it.

It is being billed as a social media event, but in all truth it'll be tightly scripted. The questions submitted in advance will be carefully vetted, Twitter said in a blog post, and screened for quality. Translation: don't expect anything too interesting.

Early attempts at audience participation online brought huge numbers of questions on legalising drugs, which the government laughed off as coming from people rigging questions.

Given the Twitter meeting, it is unfortunate that the US Secret Service has reportedly confirmed that it is investigating the hacking of a Fox New Twitter feed which announced that the president had been assassinated.