[okal]

> Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion

"Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person sharing their musings with their social circles on a public account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically* different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems obviously incorrect.

[boplicity]

That's a good point. I was wrong in the broad sense. However, I was thinking, specifically, of the context of comments on Facebook posts (and Twitter posts), where the playing field is actually level, and the comments that "rise to the top" are, as a rule, the ones that are the most inflammatory.

[okal]

Ah, I see what you're saying. That does make sense.

[hundreddaysoff]

How about this edit:

Instead, people are given the illusion that they have equal opportunity to incite discussion

Doesn't change OP's point. It's just clearer.

[majormajor]

Almost every influencer starts out as a "random person." Trump started out as just another random B-lister - a larger audience than a non-celebrity anybody, but hardly the audience he ended up with. Social media, with its broadcasting of things to everybody instead of just to a particular small-to-medium sized group of forum participants, enables them to gain massive audiences. Getting that audience as a forum poster would have been far more difficult. The path looked more like "author at a online magazine" than "now has millions on millions of Twitter followers."

[Iefthandrule]

Trump wasn't some random person though--he had a huge financial and social network before he became notorious in politics on Twitter. It does not follow that every influencer starts out as a random person at all.