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Trump's blog isn't lighting up internet, showing effectiveness of deplatforming

32 points| kvee | 4 years ago |nbcnews.com

58 comments

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[+] commandlinefan|4 years ago|reply
> effectiveness of deplatforming

... or the danger of giving unelected, unaccountable ideologues this much power over elements of our actual government.

[+] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
Sorry, what's the "danger" here? He's still doing press conferences and the Republican party is still actively cancelling members who dare to disagree with him. Folks on Fox, one of the most mainstream media companies, still refer to him as the president. For being deplatformed, he's sure got helluva platform.
[+] permo-w|4 years ago|reply
I don't at all see how making it slightly more inconvenient to see what a politician thinks is remotely a danger to your government.

25 years ago this wasn't an option at all. Now you get to see what he thinks any time you like, just by pressing a few buttons

[+] scotuswroteus|4 years ago|reply
>this much power

... or the power that's been building for twenty years without a peep from right-leaning people who all of a sudden care about this topic because it finally affects them

[+] stonogo|4 years ago|reply
What actual government do these carefully-unnamed ideologues have power over, exactly?
[+] yosito|4 years ago|reply
Unelected?
[+] orthros|4 years ago|reply
No way this could possibly come back to bite people at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Nope.
[+] approxim8ion|4 years ago|reply
No way you can imagine it's happened and is still happening to people at the opposite end of the spectrum either, it seems?
[+] data_acquired|4 years ago|reply
The anti-imperial, Communist-leaning, anti-war Left has been de-platformed a lot through the ages though. So its been biting that segment of the Left for a long long time.
[+] seventytwo|4 years ago|reply
If people on the opposite side of the spectrum start acting like trump, I’ll advocate for them to be deplatformed, too. Until then, Trump’s blog is where he belongs.
[+] approxim8ion|4 years ago|reply
Sure, but like it or not, Trump also happens to be yesterday's news for a lot of people. He still might have a very dedicated fan base, and not being on the largest platforms that now serve as portals to direct people to almost everything they encounter online certainly might hurt, but it's also possible that a lot of this is organic.
[+] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
It's a chicken and egg problem. I'm certain being shut-out of every major platform lead to much fewer people actively seeking out his commentary.
[+] krapp|4 years ago|reply
Consider the following.

Trump's blog isn't lighting up the internet, because Trump is no longer relevant. He's no longer "leader of the free world," and his words no longer matter. The man is nothing but an angry, delusional old sociopath raging into the void. The country has moved on from him and his bullshit.

[+] johnnyanmac|4 years ago|reply
>The country has moved on from him and his bullshit.

oh I wish that was the case. People may not care about the person, but the "ideals" (whatever those are. Something about walls?) will likely be something that will haunt us for the next few decades.

EDIT: looking it up, I guess even wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpism

[+] pgcj_poster|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't have an RSS feed and it's presumably banned from the sites he got deplatformed from, so how is anyone supposed to follow it?
[+] glial|4 years ago|reply
If bookmarking his site or pressing F5 occasionally is more effort than the content is worth, maybe that tells you something.
[+] permo-w|4 years ago|reply
When I went to the page it asked me if I wanted to sign up for the mailing list
[+] cmsj|4 years ago|reply
Many of us remember a time when there was no RSS and there were no social media sites, and we all still somehow managed to read blogs :)
[+] ChrisArchitect|4 years ago|reply
isn't there some new twitter account vowing to post links to new posts (as should be standard)? I don't want to look for it heh
[+] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
> Trump’s new blog has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements, defined as backlinks and social interactions — including likes, shares and comments — received across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Before the ban, a single Trump tweet was typically liked and retweeted hundreds of thousands of times

Here's the blog:

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk

I think the recycled content, partisan grandstanding, and constant use of meaningless adjectives might have something to do with it as well.

It's boring and poorly-written.

[+] permo-w|4 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call it boring. Deluded to the point of hilarity I'd say.

From 2:45 today:

>When I was in office we were known as the Peace Presidency

By whom?! I'm not sure even his supporters would agree with that

[+] helen___keller|4 years ago|reply
> I think the recycled content, partisan grandstanding, and constant use of meaningless adjectives might have something to do with it as well.

Seriously, I get that he's trying to pander to his base but I checked his blog once and the most recent post was repeating the same baseless allegations about voter fraud that he had been making on Twitter up until the day he was banned. Good riddance.

[+] Dig1t|4 years ago|reply
As much as I dislike Trump, I can't say I'm very happy seeing censorship celebrated.

Of course these private companies are allowed to do whatever they want, but silencing speech in what has effectively become a public forum doesn't help us treat the underlying cause of what caused Trump to become popular in the first place (IMHO the thing that we really need to address as a country).

[+] hayleox|4 years ago|reply
You break the rules; you suffer the consequences. He incited a riot; he lost his platform.

Banning him doesn't fix our country, sure, but social media platforms enforcing a basic standard of conduct seems like a positive to me.

[+] Traster|4 years ago|reply
Isn’t this a demonstrate he isn’t censored? He’s literally one browser tab away, and yet even that was too much for his followers.

I think this is more effective as a demonstration of how users of these sites only function within these sites.

[+] commandlinefan|4 years ago|reply
I feel the same - it may be perfectly legal for them to censor him, but it's nothing to celebrate, support, or be happy about.
[+] krapp|4 years ago|reply
> but silencing speech in what has effectively become a public forum doesn't help us treat the underlying cause of what caused Trump to become popular in the first place (IMHO the thing that we really need to address as a country).

Trump wasn't deplatformed because he was popular, he was deplatformed because he went batshit insane and tried to undermine the legitimacy of the election by spreading conspiracy theories and lies which led to a riot and attempted coup. If he'd been left alone, his rhetoric would have amplified the atmosphere of paranoia and violence. He was left alone for nearly four years across all of social media, even treated with a much lighter hand than anyone else, bit there's a limit, even for the President of the United States.

As far as addressing what caused Trump to become popular, you're right - deplatforming Trump didn't address that, nor could it have, nor was it intended to. I believe it did keep a bad situation from spiraling out of control, so it was the correct decision in that regard.

[+] tenebrisalietum|4 years ago|reply
Twitter shouldn't be the public forum, and that may be a long-term positive effect of all this. Maybe real competitors to Facebook and Twitter will eventually grow out of this.

People en masse may rediscover blogs, forums, and such and realize there is a world outside of social media walled gardens.

Hopefully that world doesn't just consist of nothing but pro-Trump or political sites and forums.

[+] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
Who wants to read some crummy blog? He once threatened to make a platform to rival twitter's. Instead, he built himself a soapbox. Social media success is tied to engagement. A soapbox is antithetical to that.

Gab was poorly executed, but they had plenty of engagement with people who were "deplatformed" elsewhere. This doesn't show the effectiveness of deplatforming, it shows Trump's lack of vision

[+] SideburnsOfDoom|4 years ago|reply
> He once threatened to make a platform to rival twitter's.

True but 1) he's hardly going to code it himself and 2) he's fundamentally not a details or follow-through person. Promises, bluster and threats are his forte. That and bankruptcies.

[+] kvee|4 years ago|reply
If he'd made a platform to rival twitter, that would have been another platform.

It does seem interesting that people like Trump, despite their celebrity, have significantly greater reach nowadays via platforms, not via blogs like in the days of the early internet.