In the wake of Trump’s deplatforming, his supporters have framed the issue almost exclusively as a question of free speech. Last week, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that would make it illegal for social networks to deplatform candidates for elected office, he used First Amendment language.
“We are protecting Floridians’ ability to speak and express their opinions,” DeSantis said. “This will lead to more speech, not less speech because speech that’s inconvenient to the narrative will be protected.”
In truth, nothing has happened since January 6 that took away Trump’s ability to speak and express his opinion. Indeed, on most days in recent weeks, he had taken to his blog to do just that. Last Tuesday, a day after DeSantis signed the bill, Trump published 10 separate blog posts on all manner of subjects.
What Trump’s blog lacked, though, was reach. According to the Post, Trump’s blog peaked at 159,000 social interactions — paltry by the standards of a man used to seeing social metrics in the millions — and the peak arrived on his blog’s first day. It has been downhill for The Desk of Donald J. Trump ever since.
The disconnect highlights the actual utility of social platforms for Trump — especially of Twitter, where he focused almost all of his efforts. The power was not that they offered him a place to speak. Rather, it was that they amplified it in crucial ways, for free, to a massive worldwide audience.
Twitter added Trump to its suggested user list and kept him there for years, even after he had begun to promote the racist birther conspiracy against Barack Obama. Trending topics continuously highlighted Trump’s latest outrageous remarks, mostly without context, driving more attention. Ranking systems tuned to favor conflict promoted Trump’s bile into nearly every timeline on the platform at one point or another.
It’s true that Trump never would have attained the reach he got through Twitter were it not also the case that the entire Western media has the app open all day, often using the controversies found there as a de facto assigning editor. As with every platform story, social networks are not the only relevant actors here. A unified press corps that took Trump seriously as a mortal threat to democracy from the start, rather than as a clownish sideshow that was good for ratings, may have given him less airtime.
But after four blissful months of Trump-free Twitter, the platform’s value to him has never been more clear. Tweets are simply more powerful than posts on a website. They can be re-shared to a global audience with a single click; they can attract new followers by the millions; and they can set the agenda for many of the world’s most prominent journalists. Trump’s rapid retreat from blogging highlights the degree to which he depended on free reach — not free speech — to advance his malign agenda.
For platforms, there could hardly be a more powerful story about the significance of their amplification mechanics. By now, many of the platform executives I know are tired of the constant drumbeat of stories about how their networks spread misinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. But the Trump story illustrates vividly why they matter. For the worst actors on their platforms, free reach is almost the entire appeal of using them.
Read more: https://www.platformer.news/p/trump-deplatforms-himself
