He's not moving anywhere and any Twitter controversy gets more people to tweet about that controversy... Until he forces a significant part of his followers to leave, it's not a bad situation for Twitter to be in.
> Until he forces a significant part of his followers to leave, it's not a bad situation for Twitter to be in.
That would force them to stop complaining, and there is a lot of value, and money to be made, in whining all the time and playing the victim constantly. So it won't happen.
Or worse, in terms of discourse. I suppose twitter is awful for something as complex as political debate, but removing an entire half of a political spectrum would only serve to further divide our country, something which the real demagogues of the world would love to capitalize on.
They're not half of a political spectrum. I can get on fine with most conservatives despite disagreeing with them, but Trump's most vocal supporters are part of a cult of personality rather than a complex polity. The divisions are already there, all the appeals to reason and fellow feeling have been exhausted.
Removing Trump would not remove entire half. (Assuming there's even a half) Some would move, majority would be just fine with occasional screenshots from another source, and lots would find a different celebrity to follow.
I would suggest that maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign and candidacy alienated many people in the center. In my mind, that seems to be the simplest explanation for the existence of Obama-Trump voters.
I think the Obama-Trump voters were a result of 8 years of partly empty promises. (He did a lot, but people hoped for much more. Yes we can / yes we scan.)
He could, but it would be a bit like Reddit/voat situation for an independent platform. Otherwise where can he go for remotely comparable publicity? IG/FB? I don't see FB working with his style of communication and it's not as easy to embed in news as Twitter. Ig would be closer.
People on Twitter are mostly not voting for Trump. Trump voter demographics are roughly white male rural middle-income evangelical non-college-educated over-50, and this does not overlap much with Twitter user demographics (80% millennials).
So Trump has nothing to lose on Twitter, so he can't lose. The goal for his tweets is to make a big story, and Twitter intervening makes it an even bigger one.
While the demographics non-overlap is true, it's not an insignificant number listening to him either. But he gets something else from Twitter: famous (verified) people involvement which amplifies what he's saying, and the profile being public to the world in a trivially news-embeddable form. I believe it matters and if he got a separate blog-like site where he can post, the reach and reuse of his posts would not be even close to what it is now. (and he'd possibly be less motivated without seeing the number of likes)
So far every legal analysis of the order draft I've seen is "it's not enforcible, mentioned agencies fought not to regulate things like that, looks like it was written just to appease him". Once the regulation is realistic, (likely needing senate involvement) Twitter may be worried.
It does impact the stock, and that's likely a part of the reason it took Twitter so long to take even the smallest action against his violations of their rules. The President is using the threat of allowing social media companies to be held liable for their content, as retaliation against Twitter. The stock was down 4.5% yesterday and is trading lower in the pre-market session.
To be honest I actually think this has a lot more to do with the fact that Dorsey has been an absent CEO. The only person who really has the authority to pick this fight is Dorsey and he hasn't been engaged enough in running twitter to care. This was observed through all sorts of side-effects where Twitter was basically failing to innovate for the past few years. Now the activists got involved and forced Dorsey into actually running the company he's finally in a position to pay attention and act on these things.
