In a brilliant move Twitter told one of its top five most popular products to go sit in the Naughty Corner forever. Since then, Twitter stock has fallen by around $7 billion or about one sixth. It couldn’t’ happen to a nicer company.
There were around 330 million Twitter users in toto in 2020 and nearly 90 million of them followed President Trump. But it’s worth remembering that only about 20% of people use Twitter, most of them apparently being rich millenials, which might explain why the whole company seems to operate like a fashion contest.
By banning Donald Trump, Twitter have shone a 2 megawatt searchlight on their own competitors, and asked nearly half their customers to “go try them.” Good move Twitter.
Twitter on the slide:
Are Big Tech and Big Government Overplaying Their Hand?
Dan Gerlernter, American Greatness
It is extraordinary that three-quarters of Republicans, according to a Quinnipiac poll, believe there was widespread voter fraud in the election, when YouTube is removing videos on the subject as fast as they are put up, and Twitter has now blocked the account of the president himself.
But the tech oligarchs who have become the de facto national leaders are not students of history nor are they men of any deep conviction—they are simply children with money. They were raised, in America’s schools, without any commitment to or understanding of the value of free speech. And they are equally ignorant of the history of tyranny. So just as they make bad democrats (with a small ‘d’), they make equally ham-handed dictators.
The criminalization of thought and speech goes back to the French Revolution and much earlier. It is freedom of speech, and not its suppression, that is the recent and real innovation, and which today remains unique to America. If Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey had studied any of this, they would know that you cannot make people agree with you just by preventing them from saying what they think. All you can buy with censorship and suppression and even the threat of violence is nothing more than the appearance of conformity and the semblance of agreement. Suppression doesn’t make thoughts go away—it drives them underground. There, as Winston Churchill pointed out, they become twice as potent for being forbidden: “A little mouse, a little tiny mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
Those casual enemies of free speech who today dominate the tech landscape have a much weaker hand than they think. Twitter has fewer daily active users in the United States than Trump had Twitter followers. Amazon Web Services and its politically aligned competitors Google, Microsoft, and IBM may appear to be the only game in town for web hosting, but that, too, will change.
New Dreams of Independence
By expunging millions of users from their ecosystem, the tech giants have created a huge and ready customer base waiting to be served. And, in a mostly free market, it will not be long before new companies arise not only to serve those orphaned customers, but to challenge and depose today’s potentates.
Perhaps never in the history of any industry has a dominant faction so openly invited its own destruction.
Twitter are the Global Conversation Police
Whistleblowers from Twitter send in these videos to Project Veritas.
I used to think Twitter had a cunning plan til I heard these two (Gadde and Dorsey) talk. Now I suspect it’s got more to do with personal fashion statements and impressing their friends.
Vijaya Gadde is a Silicon Valley lawyer who studied industrial and labor relations. Somehow it makes sense to her that she should be appointed as the Global Conversation Constable, managing the President like he was a toddler.
Wikimedia tells us that Gadde doesn’t like being censored herself. “At Twitter, Gadde has made protecting privacy and opposing the censorship of Twitter internationally policy priorities, notably by filing suit to oppose the 2014 Turkish ban of Twitter.[8] “ Righto.
A few days ago Project Veritas got a whistleblower from within Twitter that sent in a recording of Jack Dorsey who blandly talks about bigger and deeper censorship like he’s supplying widgets rather than trying to get 330 million people to agree with him.
My favourite winning line:
“The US is extremely divided , he says... our role is to protect the integrity of that conversation…. ” by forcing half the country to shut up and listen.
Giving people a voice is so old hat, Twitter aims to to promote health and happiness and “ensure no one is being harmed by” crushing their voices, exiling people from the conversation and stopping wise people from sharing their thoughts..
Feel free to express yourself indeed.