Trump Back on Twitter: For Real?

Twitter is a political megaphone and Trump has shown he knows how to use it. He’s a Twitter fan and considers himself a master at crafting tweets, a sort of political Hemingway. When he was President, Twitter was his favorite communication channel and at times he’d even announce his decisions on Twitter before he informed his own staff. He has even fired staff on Twitter before he did so to their face. (File photo: Donald J. Trump/Facebook)

After running a poll on the platform, Musk tweeted today “Trump will be reinstated” claiming the vote was a legitimate popular choice, with 52% in favor, concluding: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”; the real story behind this

As I write, Musk’s tweet announcing Trump’s “reinstatement” to Twitter is not yet a day old and it has garnered nearly 780,000 likes and over 125,000 comments :

And he immediately followed through, reinstating Trump’s account – however, it shows an old tweet, dated January 8, the last one up before being banned from the platform:

The New York Times, in its article this morning says Trump has not yet made any comment. At present, he is active on his own platform Truth Social. In a post there he said after Musk has acquired Twitter last month for $44 billion, that he was glad Twitter “will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country.”

Whether that means he will rejoin Twitter full-time is not entirely certain. In the past, on several occasions, Trump has said he didn’t like Musk – and now people on Twitter are circulating those negative comments, for example:

Also, Truth Social rules won’t make it easy, as they prevent him from posting on both platforms at once: He must wait 6 hours after he’s posted a message on Truth Social before he can do the same on Twitter.

So will Trump really go back full-time on Twitter?

I believe he will. The 6-hour delay can probably be easily ditched and in any case, it’s not likely to deter him: This is a small technical hitch that won’t matter much if you consider how Twitter gives him enormous added exposure to a much larger audience. Truth Social has only some 2 million active users. That is piddling compared to the 86 million+ followers Trump used to have on Twitter.

Now Twitter is a big platform with over 1.3 billion accounts, though the numbers that matter, the so-called monetizable daily active users are much lower:  237.8 million such users in Q2 2022, of which 41.5 million are in the United States.

That was the data as of October 29. Now with Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the run of many celebs and advertisers from the platform, Twitter is losing users every day – but with Trump coming on board, it might gain some back.

Let’s see how this might work out.

Some observers are pessimistic and value Twitter now at $18 billion, a considerable drop from its market cap of $29.56 billion as of September 2022, which was much lower than the $44 billion Musk spent to acquire it.

According to the New York Times, Twitter “teeters on the edge” as employees are leaving in droves. Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October when Musk took over, which dropped to about 3,700 after mass layoffs in November –  1,200 are said to have left last Thursday after Musk sent around an ultimatum requiring work with  “long hours with high intensity”.

As the above video argues, Musk has brought a change in corporate culture that many employees don’t accept. Adding to the problem is the fact that reportedly a large number of engineers are gone, leaving the platform in a highly vulnerable position.

But this story of employees being fired needs to be seen in a broader context: All tech companies that had experienced extraordinary growth during the pandemic are presently cutting back.

Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix have recently hit headlines with their staff cuts, as they need to adjust to a drop in consumer demand: Their customers this summer, putting Covid behind, spent less time online and have resumed their “normal life” outdoors.

And to some extent, Twitter too arguably needs to cut back, although the problem there appears to be less economic and more a change in corporate culture.

On the user side, as a result of this changed culture making Twitter appear more like a libertarian platform, you have two movements, in and out. Many progressive-leaning users have left while the conservatives are likely to flock back: Welcoming Trump back to Twitter certainly confirmed the new libertarian direction.

The influx is likely to swell with Trump MAGA fans now that Trump has officially announced two days ago that he will run for the presidency in 2024.

Twitter is a political megaphone and Trump has shown he knows how to use it. He’s a Twitter fan and considers himself a master at crafting tweets, a sort of political Hemingway. When he was President, Twitter was his favorite communication channel and at times he’d even announce his decisions on Twitter before he informed his own staff. He has even fired staff on Twitter before he did so to their face.

And there is no doubt that Trump’s signal performance on Twitter pushed political leaders around the world to adopt Twitter as their main channel of communication: Politicians now tweet before they even speak to journalists at press conferences or in interviews.

Twitter, for any ambitious politician, has an enormous advantage over the traditional media: It is instantaneous and it is shaped by you. Your message will get out there, where you want it to be – with your public – and in your own words before it ever hits the headlines. And headlines are notoriously a lottery: You never know what the newspapers might say about you.

The only drawback is that for your message to be heard, you need to have a lot of followers on Twitter and that is something Trump used to have and is likely to have again.

In short, being back on Twitter will give an enormous boost to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024.

Unsurprisingly, the conservative right in America is gloating and the left reacts, with both the hashtags “trumpisback” and “trumpisatraitor” trending on Twitter.

One particular fight is interesting to watch as it now unfolds in reaction to Musk’s restoration of Trump’s account: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green who represents Georgia’s 14th District who defines herself as a “Mother” but is an extreme right white supremacist Republican who was permanently suspended from Twitter for spreading false information (she is a QAnon proponent, among other unpleasantness) is asking to be reinstated:

One of her followers, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire immediately suggested a poll and promptly put it up but, at the time of writing, 62% had voted no.

She may be upset that Musk has not restored her account but she may well get her way soon: So far, before re-instating Trump, Musk had announced he’d unbanned several controversial accounts, notably Canadian podcaster Jordan Peterson, the right-leaning satire website Babylon Bee, and the comedian Kathy Griffin, who had been suspended from the platform earlier this month for impersonating Musk.

Why all this is problematic: The political fallout

We need to recall why Trump was banned for the platform: His tweets, after he lost the election to Biden, became laced with increasingly violent language calling to overturn the legitimate result of legitimate elections, and leading to the infamous January 6 Capitol riot that left several people dead.

To further argue, as Musk does, that the return of a poll conducted on Twitter is tantamount to “vox populi, vox dei” (“the voice of the people is the voice of gods” – meaning an indisputable higher truth) seriously stretches credibility. It is well-known that bots can vote on online polls and Twitter is no exception, as Musk should know.

And he probably does know that. There is a saying in Sicily (often applied to mafia deeds): “Non è caso, ma cosa” – that roughly translates as “things don’t happen by chance alone, they always have a cause”.

Musk has never hidden his rightist leanings. When he met Trump in the While House, he told him he’d voted for him. His conservative roots run deep: He started out his fortune at the turn of the century with his friend Peter Thiel, a notorious libertarian, launching Paypal.

They both idolize Ayn Rand and to understand their worldview, all you need to do is read Thiel’s book Zero to One. Published in 2014 and the transcription of a course he gave to Stanford students in 2012 about startups, it reveals a chilling approach to business, where not only the winner takes all, but the end justifies the means, it’s no holds barred and the objective is achieving a permanent monopoly position.

Unsurprisingly, one of his latest tweets is:

Advertisers that have left Twitter – among them General Motors, Audi, and Pfizer have pulled their ads – continue to hit the pause button. Reportedly some 423,000 verified accounts are under the outgoing system, many of them celebrities like TV powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, “Madam Secretary” actor Téa Leoni and others in the entertainment world.

This is not good news for Musk who admits he’s been losing money as a result of the advertisers leaving the platform; and now he faces the burden of having to pay huge compensation packages (3 months’ pay) to all the employees he’s fired. How he will sort all this out is anyone’s guess.

For now, he has just tweeted optimistically:

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It’s not clear whether that is a general message of hope since it comes on the heels of an earlier rather cryptic and decidedly dark tweet a day ago:

Now, which is true? Is Twitter alive or dead? Or better yet: The old Twitter that tried to keep bullies and fake news out of the platform is dead. The new Twitter opened to any speech whatsoever is alive. Is that what Musk really means?